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HappinessNow
June 19th, 2009, 10:29 PM
I am looking for a good BSD distro that has a trouble free straight forward installer, I like PC-BSD but the boot menu never seems to work. I have 2 hard drives...one with XP, I want to find a BSD distro that has a simple installer that works like Ubuntu (not exactly like Ubuntu's of course but one that has no problems recognizing a second drive and gives the selection for both on boot up).

Anybody here have in depth experience with BSD distros that might be able to make a good recommendation?...has PC-BSD improved their installer where the boot menu will recognize my XP partition and work seamlessly?
chucky chuckaluck
June 19th, 2009, 10:41 PM
have you looked at desktopbsd? http://www.desktopbsd.net/index.php?id=31
kk0sse54
June 19th, 2009, 10:43 PM
PC-BSD is probably your best bet since most *BSD OSs don't exactly focus on being user friendly, plus you can replace the FreeBSD bootloader that you're having trouble with and replace it with grub. Otherwise there's also DesktopBSD however it's quite dated although development snapshots are available at their site. Otherwise I'd highly recommend you try out at least one of the big three, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
Bigtime_Scrub
June 19th, 2009, 10:45 PM
I just recently installed Pc-BSD on an older computer to tinker around with it. They got a new one out, called Pc-BSD 7.1 that has a partition device that is similar to gparted. I didn't have any problem with it but it is different then a Linux installer so you might need to read up a bit on the dual boot installation process. It will certainly see your 2 hard drives and all the partitions on it.

Or you can try desktopBSD like someone recommended.
LookTJ
June 19th, 2009, 10:47 PM
I would recommend to start with FreeBSD before moving on to the other major BSDs(NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.)

Good luck! :)
Daisuke_Aramaki
June 19th, 2009, 10:49 PM
concur with C!oud. PC-BSD could be a good starting point.
rookcifer
June 19th, 2009, 11:05 PM
Before the BSD guys correct you, I must say don't call them "BSD distros." They hate that.
HappinessNow
June 19th, 2009, 11:06 PM
have you looked at desktopbsd? http://www.desktopbsd.net/index.php?id=31

No I haven't, I will give it a look.


PC-BSD is probably your best bet since most *BSD OSs don't exactly focus on being user friendly, plus you can replace the FreeBSD bootloader that you're having trouble with and replace it with grub. Otherwise there's also DesktopBSD however it's quite dated although development snapshots are available at their site. Otherwise I'd highly recommend you try out at least one of the big three, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.


concur with C!oud. PC-BSD could be a good starting point.

I like PC-BSD a lot it is my OS of choice, but while setting it up on a dedicated single boot system has never been a problem. I always had trouble doing a dual boot.

I have the latest version downloaded I will give it another try.

I do have to say that I just booted into the new Elive 1.9.29 "Compiz" edition
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1187050

...I downloaded about a week ago and I am blown away!....not too distract from the BSD theme of this thread I think I may install Elive Compiz Edition first. It is by far the most beautiful OS I have ever seen!