Props to the PC-BSD team!

[darthsabbath]

Wow... I just installed this today, and while I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, I've got to say, it is a swank little OS. Much like Ubuntu, PC-BSD just WORKS. I've had troubles installing *BSD in the past, and I'm a fairly experienced computer user. This went through very easily.

Granted, it uses KDE by default, and as I'm a GNOME fan, I'm having to do a lot of tweaking to get the system to look like I want, but... such is life.

The installer... wow. I love the simplicity of apt-get, but for a Windows user coming to UNIX for the first time, the PC-BSD install wizard would be a thing of beauty.

Don't get me wrong... it's no Ubuntu, which is certainly my first love as far as OSs are concerned, but it's probably a close second.

Hrm... I wonder if Solaris installs this easy. :D

(yes, I'm on an install kick right now... LOL... just experimenting with various Linux/UNIX systems, trying to see what I can learn)

Anyway, I just had to geek out here... was having that "Holy crap, this is what an OS is about" feeling... like I had the first time I used Ubuntu. :D

Phil

[benplaut]

Wow... I just installed this today, and while I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, I've got to say, it is a swank little OS. Much like Ubuntu, PC-BSD just WORKS. I've had troubles installing *BSD in the past, and I'm a fairly experienced computer user. This went through very easily.

Granted, it uses KDE by default, and as I'm a GNOME fan, I'm having to do a lot of tweaking to get the system to look like I want, but... such is life.

The installer... wow. I love the simplicity of apt-get, but for a Windows user coming to UNIX for the first time, the PC-BSD install wizard would be a thing of beauty.

Don't get me wrong... it's no Ubuntu, which is certainly my first love as far as OSs are concerned, but it's probably a close second.

Hrm... I wonder if Solaris installs this easy. :D

(yes, I'm on an install kick right now... LOL... just experimenting with various Linux/UNIX systems, trying to see what I can learn)

Anyway, I just had to geek out here... was having that "Holy crap, this is what an OS is about" feeling... like I had the first time I used Ubuntu. :D

Phil


from what i researched (don't want to risk partitioning, again, after two fiascoes), PC-BSD is to BSD as Ubuntu is to *NIX... a distro for the masses :)

[totalshredder]

from what i researched (don't want to risk partitioning, again, after two fiascoes), PC-BSD is to BSD as Ubuntu is to *NIX... a distro for the masses :)
Yes, it's so true. I've burnt myself a copy and am going to install it once I get some time. It's an awesome Idea, and I've always wanted to use BSD :-D

[darthsabbath]

from what i researched (don't want to risk partitioning, again, after two fiascoes), PC-BSD is to BSD as Ubuntu is to *NIX... a distro for the masses :)

From what I can tell, you're right... very easy to use, very friendly. Pretty much anyone could sit down and start using it, so long as they didn't need to access the command line. The directory structure is... similar, but there's some differences that sorta throw me off. Also I believe it uses tsch for the shell, rather than bash.

The hard disk partitioning scheme was a little unfriendly; I have multiple partitions, and it just listed two... an NTFS partition and a DOS partition (which I think included my Linux partitions, considering the size it listed) but I believe this is BSD as a whole, rather than just PC-BSD. I simply chose unpartitioned space and it did it's magic.

Phil

[poofyhairguy]

What are the minimun system requirements you think? I think my experiamental machine might get that.

[jdong]

Since it runs KDE by default, you need 82MB of RAM+SWAP combined to get KDE to start.

Beyond that, I'd say at least a 300MHz processor to enjoy the experience?


NOTE: I've run FreeBSD 5.3 + KDE on a 133MHz laptop before, and that actually worked quite well, until Firefox came along. Try to use light browsers, like Konqueror or dillo, instead of Firefox if you're down in the <300MHz gutters. :)

[darthsabbath]

One thing about PC-BSD that's got me excited is OO.o 2. I haven't installed it on Ubuntu yet, but since it's the only OO.o on PC-BSD, I figured I'd give it a go... it opens *FAST*. Dunno if it'll be the same on Linux, but... wow. Looks great so far.

TBH, the only thing I haven't played with is multimedia... unsure of whether MP3s are enabled by default or not. Think I'm gonna play with that when I get home from work.

Phil

[jdong]

OOo2 is much faster than OOo1, especially on Fedora where it's natively compiled with gcj.