Submitted by PC-BSD 9.1 has been released. “The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 9.1 is now available! This release includes many exciting new features and enhancements, such as a vastly improved system installer, ZFS ‘Boot Environment’ support, TrueOS (a FreeBSD based server with additional power-user utilities), and much more!” PC-BSD 9.1 is based on the soon-to-be released FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE with several enhancements, including an updated installer, better ZFS support during installation, bug fixes and new GUI configuration/administrative utilities.
Where did it go?
I couldn’t find it either, so I just installed it on a spare hard drive. Pretty slick so far, the only issue I’ve had is that downloading from the App Café is really slow. That’s to be expected with a new release though.
It’s not quite ready to replace Manjaro Linux on my main workstation just yet, but it may earn a place on my Mac mini soon!
Yeah, my problem is I can’t spare any room for it (maybe when I delete the Win8 eval partitions), so for now a live DVD is the only way. That’s somewhat disappointing. How is it compared to 9.0?
Edited 2012-12-22 03:53 UTC
Well I’ve changed hardware since then so take that into consideration, but it seems to be much more stable and cohesive this time around. I know some of that is due to improvements to KDE as well, as only very recently I’ve been able to use that DE to get work done.
I’m definitely impressed though! I’m considering moving away from GNU/Linux on my workstation and vanilla FreeBSD is a pain to install and configure, so I jumped on the chance to try the new PC-BSD. For me, it’s almost there. I also love the “True OS” server features; geeks.com has some nice server hardware on sale really cheap and I’m thinking of picking up a unit for bare metal to play around on. BSD is my first choice for a server OS.
Edit: Commenting via phone still sucks: P
Edited 2012-12-22 04:13 UTC
I agree on FreeBSD being a pain to configure as a complete desktop OS, yet awesome for servers. My main problem with PC-BSD has always been its way of packaging programs, Windows-style, with everything needed for a package contained within the package. Good for eliminating dependencies (duplicates), but not for conserving disk space, unfortunately. In a way, I kind of wish DesktopBSD was still in development… it was similar, also very good, but with a more traditional style of package management.
I am tempted to give the latest version a try though, overall it sounds good, and I do like BSD in general. Some *huge* upgrades appear to be coming up with FreeBSD 10, BTW… of course, that’s probably a year or more away, but it’s already sounding good.
You can use the native FreeBSD methods of installing software from the ports collection (from source) or from binary packages; port management tools such as portmaster can be used. Still this method does not “play 100 % nice” with PBI which is the preferred method of installation on PC-BSD. But if you want to get rid of (old-fashioned) manual downloading and handholding, there’s a CLI tool for PBI installations (which includes the abilty of scripting and automating processes). PBI offers easy binary methods of installing and updating your software through a centralized control mechanism while providing decentralized entry ways for software. Users who do not want to deal with the “complicated” ports collection will probably find PBI easier to use, and professional users can still rely on efficient tools.
There’s an excuse, erm… reason for that: disks are huge and cheap today. 🙂
Mine is small and expensive (SSD).
I completely disagree with this logic and see that as no excuse. It is still a limited resource (and probably always will be; as drive capacities increase, so will file size), I actually paid for it, and I always attempt to conserve such resources. I’m no fan of waste, especially when it comes to shared computer resources.
That said, I do realize that in the case of PC-BSD, they did it for what IMO was an acceptable reason, so it’s… well, acceptable. Still goes against my preferences though.
That is not how PBI are handled anymore. Originally, installing a PBI would include all of its duplicated dependencies, but that is no longer the case. The last couple of releases have used a small filtering process which removes duplicate libraries. This means installing a package, like Firefox, doesn’t take up any more room on PC-BSD than it would on, say, Linux.
Well, we’re not really that interested in your lame comments anyway.
You’re still mad about that Haiku thread from some time last year, I take it? Well, I hope you have a happy holiday season.
I broke down and said “fsck it” and decided to delete the Win8 partitions to make room for a new one last night. I haven’t put a whole lot of time trying PC-BSD out yet, but
Two things that don’t work:
– Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02). No surprise here–I’m lucky if I can find a Linux distro that supports this wretched, god damn wireless card… I’ve given up on even bothering to try to get it to work several years ago, so I don’t blame BSD on it. I honestly no longer even care about that card.
– Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs CA0106 Soundblaster. This one’s a little more important, and it’s probably the only thing that would prevent me from using PC-BSD exclusively on the machine as a desktop OS.
One thing I am exremely impressed about is its memory use with KDE. It’s generally very low at ~200 MB or less for the most part, even while installing packages (something that never seems to fail to spike memory use in most Linux distros I’ve tried). Of course, I wasn’t really heavily using the system so I’ll be doing more testing, but that’s very impressive so far. openSUSE guzzles several hundred megs right after logging in, quickly leading to swapping.
Your BCM4318 wifi is supported with OpenBSD, your CA0106 may possibly work with OpenBSD but would have to test it to find out for sure
ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/handbook/9.1/handbook_en_ver9.1.html#__Ref…
2.6 PC-BSD® Live Mode
Beginning with PC-BSD® 9.1, Live Mode is a read-write live image that is only available for USB media. The uncompressed live image is about 4GB in size, but you will want to write it to a USB device that will provide sufficient room for the files that you wish to save and any applications that you wish to install.
NOTE: the speed of Live Mode is dependent upon the quality of the USB device. If you are purchasing a device, look for one that is advertised as “high speed”.
To use PC-BSD® Live Mode, download the live USB version. Once you have written the image file to a USB media, boot the system with the USB device inserted. Assuming your BIOS has been set to boot from that device, you should see some startup messages followed by the PC-BSD® graphical boot menu, shown in Figure 2.6a.
Not that I’ve tried, but does this pose a problem for VMs like qemu that emulate a dvd drive for installation?
I never test new operating systems on bare metal.
Maybe the usb image can be used to emulate a hard drive.
Bleh… just as I suspected. This makes their “live” variant completely useless to me. Thanks for the info though.
This is a perfectly delicious toy
Both the GUI and command-line package manager doesn’t show that system update is available. I might need to wait. If they have added additional device drivers for WIFI in this release I would be the happiest guy.
Update: After updating the package manager with bug fix release, it shows the System Release 9.1. So downloading it now.
Edited 2012-12-22 13:02 UTC
I’ve always been disappointed by PC-BSD because it doesn’t run natively on my hardware. It can’t handle mixed controllers (SATA and PATA) and it didn’t work with my ide->sata conversion switch either.
I had much better luck running it under a virtual machine (Oracle/Sun Virtualbox), where it works fine.
I have to say, though, for the desktop user, I’m not sure I see any compelling reason to run PC-BSD. Can anyone here tell me if I’m missing something? thanks.
1) It’s basically FreeBSD; you can’t go wrong there.
2) It’s fully set up with a choice of desktop environment; traditionally KDE.
3) If your hardware supports it, it all just works right from the start.
That’s really pretty much it. Learn more about the BSDs and specifically FreeBSD to find out if it is a good match for you. I recommend the following article if you already know and/or use Linux:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
Also being able to install directly to ZFS without having to perform any magic tricks is very cool.
It probably has slightly better software and hardware support than a Solaris distro, thus making it the best os with zfs by default. That is all I can think of to answer your question. And even then, zfs as a reason is pushing it a bit
How about Debian/kFreeBSD ? 😉
Especially for a Debian/Linux user as myself.
Anyway, btrfs is maturing pretty well lately.
Only 2 kernel versions to go until most of the features people want will be there and mature (enough). Those 2 versions will be used to merge RAID5/6 which would be similair to RAIDZ in ZFS.
I hope bcache (general read/write block cache for Linux which implements something similair to L2ARC) will be there too.
2 kernel versions is about 3 months to a half a year (releases are between 60 to 90 days)
Edited 2012-12-25 14:58 UTC
Questions is, why? When has it ever been detrimental to widen your skillset?
Besides “(enough)” is simply no good. Especially when you’re attempting to put BtrFS at the same level as ZFS.
There’s a world of difference between mainstreaming some patches and a filesystem being suitable for mission critical work.
I’ve used SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.
The overhead of maintaining several different systems is just not worth it. Actually, I think we’re moving to even less systems. With anything which is currently not yet virtual to one virtualisation platform.
Enough in our case might mean btrfs as the backend filesystem with Ceph which replicates the data on several systems which should mean a whole lot less risk.
And as usual, the list of compatible devices is buried somewhere deep, and no list of compatible systems is provided. When will these guys learn? We users do not want to play roulette. What we want is: Here is our OS and here are the devices and systems it supports. Optional: Here is where to buy systems with our OS preinstalled.
Also, what’s the point of having a compatibility check tool that can be run only after you ‘ve downloaded the OS? Can’t they release a version for Windows and OS X?
Anyway, I really like the concept of PC-BSD. I ‘ve heard you can run it over OpenGL (without losing the GUI) and not have to tolerate X. Also, what audio system does PC-BSD use?
Edited 2012-12-23 16:49 UTC
PC-BSD is pretty much FreeBSD with a nice installer, a binary-based package installer and preconfigured DEs. In other words, FreeBSD’s very thorough hardware compatibility list is what you should be looking at. It even says so several times in the PC-BSD docs.
To save you some reading, pretty much any business class x86/64 workstation will be supported, most wireless devices are supported, and nearly every wired Ethernet device is supported. Video support is best on Nvidia and Intel but still iffy on AMD/ATI. The Intel driver still has issues with virtual terminals, I believe. And of course just about any x86/64 server hardware works fine.
In my experience, the only times I’ve had hardware issues were when I tried FreeBSD or PC-BSD on low quality consumer grade hardware, especially laptops. On business workstations and laptops it’s pretty solid. Which, of course, makes good sense given its pedigree.
You can read all about the sound system here:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound
Installed it on my laptop, never got to see it boot, it blew away the mbr, and the laptop was a brick. I managed to get Win7 and Xubuntu working(Thanks grub) but grub couldn’t see the BSD partition. I may try again when I have more time, but pretty disappointed.
It wants to live on its own drive, pretty much. It is very difficult to get its bootloader to work with other OSes. For a laptop, I would suggest swapping in a spare blank hard drive for testing BSD, otherwise just run it in a VM.
Right now I have it on a spare drive all to itself in my workstation and I boot into it using the computer’s boot device menu. That way I don’t have to fiddle with Grub or the Windows boot loader.
That’s odd. I have used Grub to multiboot with OpenBSD partitions before. You need tp use the chainloader for that though.
The whole partition was fubar, something went horribly wrong. Might not have been PC-BSDs fault, I haven’t had time to investigate. I was able to recover, so no big deal.