With some unchanging facts – 1) I´m lazy, 2) I want many things working out-of-box on operating sytem levels – the world of BSD is a little bit closed to me 🙂 GhostBSD meets my requirements for many years and I can surely not forget about PC-BSD. Of course in any adventure with BSD you should know development trees of UNIX systems.
Let´s start
Small philosophy lessons at beginning – what can force me to move from linux to BSD? Many people will stand on linux at any cost. Same dogmatism can be seen within Windows users, remember? 🙂 Ok, so if you´re angry with endless – finding hole – fixing hole, many many developers with many many idiotic blunders in their code…. shouting on display when you can see kernel fix, fixing dividing by zero…. Maybe this „code jungle“ in linux world would be enough for you. Maybe the only way is to join BSD world 🙂
PC-BSD announced 10.0.1 during 14.3.2014. This release fixed many bugs + updates big packages (KDE is now 4.12.2). Basic features:
– KDE as basic window manager (you can also choose many others:
)
– good Windows mechanism integration (LDAP/AD, Samba)
– PBI package system (including GUI)
– 2 in 1 – PC-BSD (desktop adjusts) x TrueOS (server adjusts)
– hybrid iso file (can be burned or used with USB flash drive)
– extremely stable and smoothly running (tested on DualCore 1.86Ghz, 2GB RAM)
– most advanced non-beta (greetings to BTRFS developers 😉 ) file system ever – ZFS
– good documentation, talkative community
Installation
You have two options for installing this OS into your machine. Graphical + text install. I tried both, graphical is for most lazy people who wants to install systems with default options due few clicks. Text install seems more logical for me:
Now after clicking on default option, setup process will run.
For checking installing options /chosen by installer/ you have to edit them:
In disk option is hidden also bootloader (GRUB or BSD Loader). ZFS layout is very interesting, you can adjust it or just (better) read about ZFS hundreds of pages and recognize that this setup is fine tuned 🙂
Next thing worth to check is viewing install script. Voila:
For editing just quick reminder that you exit the vi with :q! command 🙂 After clicking on install option, install process is started:
Installation process lasted 8 minutes. After reboot into graphical environment I was asked about basic information (language, time zone, hostname, root password, new user name and password (with an option to encrypt home directory). After inputing values, kdm is restarted and im able to log-in commonly:
Text x graphical install differencies
I was very surprised that text mode offers less information to setup. I can´t find any option for installing virtualbox tools for example. In graphical envrionment virtual guest was nicely detected – and i was also able to setup VMware Tools in addition. Similar situation – i couldn´t find any option for installing MATE instead of KDE window manager.
PC-BSD 10.0.1 with MATE (through graphical installer)
Ok, this is my favourite envrionment. PC-BSD looks very similar to linux distribution with MATE. 12 themes, 22 backgrounds, classic fonts to choose from. Font smoothing is without any issue, all working perfectly. 327-paged pdf file – PC-BSD handbook – is located in Desktop.
Configuring
PC-BSD Control Panel icon is also in Desktop:
I just said „wow“ 🙂 I have seen so many options only in YAST manager (SuSE family). Disk Manager provides basic information about default ZFS pool:
Second look corrects my opinion about „basic“, ok you can do a lot of ZFS-related stuffs with this tool:
Overall – at this place you can manage many things, many things you can´t setup even on linux (Adobe Flash configuration). All hardware detected at first shot. Virtualbox additions installed during installation and working smoothly with host computer.
Software
Every modern operating system includes package manager with graphical extension providing installing new software, update already installed software, etc… (hello Microsoft Windows, still stucked in 20th century? 😀 )
AppCafe looks interesting. After updating I have 802 packages for installing. It´s not enough but can be sufficient for work (you can count with some binary software distribution, etc…). I´m just reminding, that Ubuntu has around 30 000 packages, Debian around 40 000 packages. Of course it depends how many packages are just libraries which are senseless alone.
I have installed 6 packages to test their behaviour before. Now I want to install my love (already 20 years old love – thank you Microprose!)
After clicking on „Install Now“:
(btw BSD was ill for many years distributing very old version of software – can you check Firefox version? Amazing!! (just to describe – 27.0.1 is also the latest Firefox version for Windows and linux platforms in a time of article creation))
Well, icon was created on Desktop but OpenTTD is missing in „Games“ folder in menu. Interesting. I tried to see some Preferences for this application again (again through AppCafe):
Now I can see possibility of icon (shortcut) adding. Perfect! Almost! At least in my case after clicking on Menu icons – Add – nothing happened. After rebooting all looked fine, as I expected (new category created) :
I was just searching for any software there and their versions: LibreOffice 4.1.5_1, OpenOffice 4.1.0_2, NetBeans 7.4, Eclipse 3.7.1_4 that is really fine. Now something much worse: bluefish 0, mysql 0, mariadb 0, postgresql 0 (only pgadmin), firebird 0, sqlite 0. I was using just default repositories:
But still this is just disillusion for me. I know, I know, this OS is designed for BFU, common users, using office tools, writing emails, etc… But missing all those databases is something badly imaginable for me 🙂
Overall
With no doubt, PC-BSD 10.0.1 is exceptional operating system. I´m excited how many things were changed from 9.x version. Still, I´m a little bit unsure what is the main users group. Next to BSD fans, new technologies fans (ZFS) – who is this OS for? Show me one person who can use most of ZFS features and…. and also be BFU without need of any database, using Desktop-target operating system 🙂 Maybe I just have bad imagination and also I was looking badly for any database software. At least – there is NO version of Oracle database or DB2 database for BSD systems. That´s simply pitty. ZFS with database structure should be extremely hard to manage + having extremely huge consumption + having extremely safety of data 🙂
Final score:
90%
-a-