Joe Sixpack goes BSD!

BSD has the reputation of being the most geeky OS, simply because it' s rarely used by average users. The reason is that the average think its too complicated, which IMHO is far from the truth. The only thing with any OS is, that if you want to use all of its power, it takes some learning curve, no exclusions.

Once upon a time GNU/Linux was considered a strictly Geek OS to, but times have changed. BSD however remained to be as such. Well, not quite!

Last week the 1.4 release of PC-BSD was announced and things have changed pretty much.

I downloaded the 2 CD-ROM set, installed it and my conclusion is: thanks to the great work of the PC-BSD team, BSD is ready for Joe Sixpack!

Installation.

The installation is pretty straight forward. Just pop in the first CD and boot from it. After waiting a couple of seconds, the installation GUI will fire up. Also that' s pretty straight forward for someone who has installed a GNU/Linux distribution before. Choose your preferred language, timezone, choose the type of installation (new or update), set the superuser password, add a new user, edit your partition table to suit your needs, click on next and enjoy the slick slide show :-)

The installer also gives you the ability to install some frequently used apps. For this purpose you need the second CD. If you prefer to install these apps afterwards, using the PBI system and your native language is English, you don' t even require the second CD.

First boot, the Ooooooh wow! effect.

As written above the installation went without a glitch, this - to some extend - also counts for the hardware detection. The system only installed the wrong nVIDIA driver. However it recognized my Geoforce 2 MX400 without a glitch. Anyway it was very easy to choose an older version of the nVIDIA driver and set up the X.org system without a pain. The rest of the hardware worked without any interaction of my self, even the DVD-ROM I entered into the drive was mounted automatically.


Eyecandy for lusers.

One of the reasons that made me exited about PC-BSD is that Compiz-Fusion is enabled by default and beside that Superkaramba is also installed by default. Now Ive been fooling around with Compiz and Beryl for quite some time and it was always a pain (pretty confusing) to properly set it up. Not anymore! The first time you fire up Compiz-Fusion, PC-BSD asks you whether you want to start it by default after bootstrap. This is a great feature, because until now, I always had to fire up Beryl manually, which is pretty weird, because all Unices that I know of, support so called symlinks (symbolic links == shortcuts in Windows), you simply create a symlink to to the Beryl binary in the "automatically start up stuff" directory (folder) of KDE and it should work. Well unfortunately it did not! Anyway this problem is solved in PC-BSD 1.4.

PBI: the package system.

Now every OS needs a platform to install and remove apps. Here comes PC-BSD' s great strength to exposure. PC-BSD supports FreeBSD' s port system and even provides a KDE based GUI for that purpose, but more interesting is PC-BSD's PBI system, which is comparable with Linspire' s "CNR == Click 'n Run". A shortcut to the PBI Directory, using Konquerror is presented at your desktop by default (don' t remove it, you' ll need it - trust me!).

Spoiled GNU/Linux users will find this system pretty much disturbing and maybe even somewhat clumsy, because every package has to be installed separately. Unlike most GNU/Linux package managers, you can' t install a "batch" of packages. Windows users however will feel very comfortable with this approach. All you have to do is browse the package list, click on a package of your choice and eventually read the package' s description. Choose the closest download mirror and a Install Shield alike wizard will guide you trough the installation process.

Conclusion.

PC-BSD is an extremely user friendly and secure BSD, based on the rock solid FreeBSD 6.2 stable core, with a easy to use package management system, a friendly installation GUI and great hardware recognition. It is easy enough for average users and interesting enough for advanced users. It' s a easy pathway to the world of BSD *a must have*!

Update on request of a reader:

The icon set is simoo's OS-K.
The color scheme is 5er's 53dark Blue.
A screenshot tour is available here.