[QUOTE=Johnnie J;3687730]They even have their own version of Apache, I think they started that due to a change in Apache's license. Could be wrong about that though.[QUOTE]

You are correct about that.

Hi girarde,

Thanks for the confirmation on that. I was sure I'd read that somewhere. As I mentioned in another post, I just order OpenBSD 4.6 and several of Jacek Artimak's books. Quite excited about the arrival of those books.

I downloaded the latest version, I love how easy the .pbi system sounds. I haven't installed yet though. I wanted this to replace OpenSuSE 11, but I want a winxp/pcbsd dual boot system, with no fuss, just install & it see windows/set up dual boot. If OpenSuSE had a system like .pbi I would love it. The thing about PC-BSD is on the pc-bsd forums, there are lots of "probs. with x" posts & the docs. kind of suck. So I just thought oh well stay with OpenSuSE 11. I wish someone would make a .pbi like sys for linux.

Hi Edward78,

I've been using it for months without any trouble. Granted, I've only installed a couple of programs using it; I don't remember what those were, but I can tell you that the PBI has caused me no problems and that the updater works very well, too.

Synaptic for the Debian-based Linux distros is very similar to PBI. You pretty much launch the app, browse through a nice list of about 20,000 packages and apps (or search, of course), and click "install". It handles dependencies and everything - most programs install in seconds with no fuss.

This is found on Debian, and things based on Debian like Ubuntu.

Here's some screenshots, so you can take a look.
http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/action.html

I think personal preference, education and work play a factor in the operating systems we as users choose to rely upon daily. Even for the Linux/BSD/Solaris hobbyist, it's all about what you get comfortable using or meet first.

As for PC-BSD, I think it needs a lot of work but it's coming along quite nicely though. The installer looks magnificent but I am not a big KDE fan, nothing personal to the in-house developers. I personally just prefer fluxbox/gnome-lite/openbox instead. If the ability to switch Window Managers was set in place it would make things easier for older computers and picky users like myself.

Presently, I've installed the desktop version (PC-BSD) and switched to using Fluxbox as the primary Window Manager. I understand that KDE is still bloating me with file-space usage but I am fine with it for the time being. The main reason I am loving PC-BSD right now though is the auto-detecting my hardware during the installation part. It really saves me time from having to compile a lot of software from Ports on FreeBSD and losing A LOT of time waiting. I am all about using FreeBSD's "minimal" installation being careful to select only what I will use often! This takes me a day to a month to accomplish satisfying standards. What I am trying to say is that I don't always have hours to compile software and I don't have an extremely fast PC either. But as a FreeBSD user I can appreciate not having to edit a lot of config files. I was also very happy to see that PC-BSD keeps the ports separated from PBI's which is great for power users.

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[leaping@pcbsd /usr/home/leaping]$ uname -a; dmesg | grep CPU:
FreeBSD pcbsd 7.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Mon Nov 24 20:22:16 EST 2008 root@pcbsdx32-7:/usr/obj/pcbsd-build/cvs/7.0.2-src/sys/PCBSD i386
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (2992.51-MHz 686-class CPU)

I migrated away from Windows to Linux for stability reasons. I migrated again from Linux to *BSD for similar reasons (after running Linux for 6 years or so). When I made the switch to *BSD, I downloaded FreeBSD and OpenBSD (I really don't care much for "portability" in the case of NetBSD (I have 9 Intel/AMD boxes at home and 1 sparc...so any Linux or BSD will do)). I installed FreeBSD on my machine and ran it for about a month or two, then installed OpenBSD and ran it for about a month or two. Both systems were amazing...stock FreeBSD's performance was on par (or better) than my overly tweaked Gentoo installation, and OpenBSD *just worked*, with very little fuss or searching past man pages.

In the end, OpenBSD won out because I really don't care how fast something goes, so long as it goes 100% of the time when I tell it to...which OpenBSD has yet to fail at.

LOL - this would require me to run a very interesting setup at home, since the first machines I really used a lot were Sun, SGI, and DEC boxes (89/90 or so). I think I first worked with FreeBSD in about 94, and used it as my main OS at home until Debian got interesting around 96 or so. Then I sort of distro hopped until about 99 and I've been mostly FreeBSD/Debian since. Professionally, I have supported AIX, Solaris, RedHat, SuSE, SCO, Tru64, VMS, and BSD variants since about 97 depending on the shop.

I think your logic has merit, though, since I'd love to get a nice little Alpha station at home

So, updating on this.
I attempted to use PC-BSD as my main box for awhile... as well as move some of the other systems at home across. My results were very mixed.

Of 4 machines, PC-BSD was unusable on 3 of them - an Acer laptop that installed fine but would power off randomly (had to actually remove the battery and power to get it to restart - wow). A brand new desktop that it simply rebooted on in a loop without ever getting to the install screen, and one where it ran... sometimes. Sometimes it simply hung at the boot screen. I tried various options like ACPI on/off, vesa only, safe mode, etc.

Where it worked, it was good. I was pretty happy with it, and it was stable. The overall instability (even on boxes that run FreeBSD 7.2 and Debian Lenny well) was shocking. I even ordered the official DVD just to make sure I didn't have some weird download corruption.

I attempted to get my work done on it for a week, and I mostly succeeded. I had to go to my Linux box here and there for some things (mainly because installing ports was very time consuming when I needed something that had no PBI). It worked adequately with most of the work I did (which is mainly coding, SSH, xterms, document editing, etc).

So I would totally recommend against it unless you're lucky enough that it works out of the box.

that I was able to setup and use sucessfully as, you may have guessed, a desktop OS. I've just installed 1.7, based on FreeBSD 7.2, and really like it.

Unfortunately, DesktopBSD will no longer be developed. (Too lazy to find the link, it's on their site somewhere.)

Here: http://desktopbsd.net/index.php?id=43&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=41&tx_ttnews[backPid]=55&cHash=b6ad95fd57

Honestly, PC-BSD is a pretty good idea, once they actually get the kinks worked out. The machines it installs well on seem to hold up nicely in my limited testing, and it is nice to have KDE4 by default. Perhaps when I am out from under some of my current workload I'll see if I can contribute a bit.

When it was first out, there were, of course, the people who didn't want BSD to be that automated, so to speak, but with spokespeople like Dru Lavigne supporting it, even the naysayers came to see what was good about it.

I wish I still had time to follow it, and I wish it the best of success.

On my dell D820 I have PC-BSD 7.1 on their now. Install went really well. and so far all pbi's have gone smoothly. The only thing that does seem to happen is when I try and update my system over wireless. It just sets my wireless in a pissy mood and I have to wind up rebooting.

But other than that, I am pretty happy with it.

Not to really 'necropost' but I did want to follow up on this now that I've been using PC-BSD as my main OS for 2 mos.

I have been quite happy with it, and more so with the 8.0 alpha that's out now. The alpha resolved the issue with my laptop (which turned out to be heat-related, btw - powerdevil simply didn't work and it ran the machine full-bore until it died).

The 8 alpha version has fixed the partitioning issues I had with 7, and the PBI system is working splendidly.
I look forward to PC-BSD 8 coming out in release, since these fixes were huge pain points for me.

The forums are still something of a mess, but the mailing lists are superb.