PC-BSD 10.0 is now available
 

PC-BSD 10.0-RELEASE is now available:

http://blog.pcbsd.org/2014/01/pc-bsd...now-available/

Yea!!!!!!

Cool!

Installed and loving it.

Set it up on a spare 80GB HDD formatted using GPT partitioning, ZFS file system, chose Xfce, and all was good.

ATM I'm downloading the source to rebuild the kernel without audio to setup OSSv4.

Really and truthfully, PC-BSD is one of the best out-of-the-box ready-to-use BSD distributions out there and it's based on FreeBSD.

It's almost like Slackware with a BSD engine underneath the hood chugging away.

Nice! Now you have me curious. I will have to take it for a test drive. Starting my download now. :)

I did an installation with Cinnamon for the hell of it. It was OK. No fault of PC-BSD; I would have been happier with Xfce, I'm sure. Solid distro, easy intro to the world of BSD. So is GhostBSD, for that matter.

I'm rebuilding my kernel tomorrow to remove the BSD audio driver and OSSv4 port is going in.

I seriously love how raw BSD feels at times compared to Linux distributions, but it also feels more amalgamated and complete against itself as its a true OS and not just a collection of packages at the core.

The cool thing I like is you can pick between PCBSD as a complete install or TrueOS as a minimal install.

Yes, I would agree with this.

PC-BSD 10.0.1, is now available.

http://distrowatch.com/

According to their page at DistroWatch.com, Xfce is part of the PC-BSD package.
Not true, or you chose not to try it?

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pcbsd

I have done it with Xfce, I was wanting to try out something new. Just noticed that the 10.0.1 update has Cinnamon 2.0, so that's a plus.

Very slick indeed. Just installed 10.0 with XFCE in Virtualbox. Love it. :)

Had to go out for the afternoon, so I have just now installed and started to explore.
So far, I'm very impressed!
Things I had to compile and install in Slackware are "built-in" and ready to go in PC-BSD. Easiest install I've ever done. Far easier than ms-windows.
I'm probably come across something that changes my mind... :) sooner or later, but so far... as I said, it is very impressive...
Installed it to a second hard drive, so it is just a matter of figuring out how to "mount" the Linux drive and moving files over to the BSD drive....

Well..... I was very impressed... until I noticed how much memory is uses. If Gkrellm is correct it was using 2 1/2 GIGS OF MEMORY JUST TO RUN WITH THE XFCE D/E!!!!
Is that typical?!

^ I noticed it was a RAM-hog when I briefly tried it out. I couldn't really see any justification to use it over my preferred OpenBSD, honestly. If I was going to do a FreeBSD, I'd just go with FreeBSD-proper. Although the GhostBSD folks are doing some nice work, too.

I also note a marked difference in RAM usage between PC-BSD 10.0 and FreeBSD 10.0, that is, PC-BSD 10.0 uses about 3 x as much RAM as FreeBSD 10.0. My observations are based on my two VMs (PC-BSD and FreeBSD). PC-BSD has a s**t load of services running on start up. I prefer OpenBSD and XFCE as it is super light and fast. I'm currently dual booting Slackware and OpenBSD on two boxes. This FreeBSD VM uses about 280 MB of RAM with XFCE.

Well... I actually tried that and installed the FreeBSD DVD. Then I started going through the documentation and found every component, e.g., Xorg, has to be installed individually, via the old, "make install clean," etc., etc., etc......
Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt and the coffee mug.
That was YEARS ago and I'm not about to go through it again...
Maybe, some rainy winter day when I'm in the "home" and can't get out of the wheelchair, I'll re-consider, but for now, while I can still get around under my own power... not going to happen! There are better things to do with what time I have left on this old planet.
:)

PC-BSD will by design use more memory due to all the services it loads on startup to offer a complete desktop operating environment.

You can however disable those services you don't need by editing rc.conf-pcbsd and rc.conf to what you need only. After some tweaking I got mine down to 570MB of RAM used by the system and services.

Wow, DOWN to 570MB? What DE are you using? My OpenBSD box (32-bit, granted) running Xfce idles at about 68MB, and my Slackware laptop (64-bit) running Xfce idles at about 160MB. Even my 64-bit Arch/Gnome 3 idles at about 300MB.

The more I use PC-BSD the more I like it, but if it is going to use 2 1/2 gigs of RAM it better be mowing the lawn and doing the laundry.
:)

^ AND making the coffee! :D

No one is forcing you to compile from source in FreeBSD. FreeBSD now ships with an excellent package management system called PKGng. To install xorg in FreeBSD 10.0 I issue this command.

# pkg install xorg

That is it. You have xorg installed in a few minutes. Then all you need to do is configure /etc/rc.conf for hald and dbus. Dead simple.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO.../x-config.html

And it does make a good cup of coffee, but I just can't justify using that much RAM. A couple of nights ago the machine was running PC-BSD with the Xfce DE and the only application open was Gkrellm which reported 2.8+ GIGS OF RAM was being used!
That is way, Way, WAY OUT OF LINE!
I'll keep it on the hard drive for a while, but won't be using it again anytime soon.
Cheers!

I hear you, man! If you want light and fast give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a try.

I suggest NetBSD too.
I know its community is poorer than other *BSD, but in my opinion it's too underrated :)

I agree, NetBSD is still underrated after so many years of surviving the tests of time. It may be the Slackware of BSD world. The documentation is very good though.

Regards.

I have followed this thread recently, and done a good bit of reading around the BSD forums here on LQ.

I have run BSDs (currently only FreeBSD) in a VM under Slackware, but no serious use. I have never tried to use one as a primary OS, but am interested in doing so at this time. (Downloading FreeBSD 10 as I type).

This thread has put me off of PC-BSD due to apparent resource requirements.
NetBSD has some attraction for use on older hardware, but the recent politics of it puts me off as well.
I am unfamiliar with Dragonfly except for a good reading of their website today - will probably give it a look.
FreeBSD has survived my previous VM installs, for reasons too ephemeral to try to state.
OpenBSD is familiar by name, I have run it in a VM but not recently.

I may start another thread when I get serious about it, hopefully next couple of weeks, but I would appreciate any comments to put on my stack from current BSD users... things of immediate interest to me...

1. Since my focus at this time is directed to FreeBSD and Dragonfly, what might be the major features or use cases to differentiate them?

2. I currently run Slackware on everything for home and business and love it! In particular I think the Slackware package tools are as good as it gets - how would the BSDs package tools compare, and in particular, would my Slackware habits be at home there?

3. I tend to rely on older hardware, dual core 64 bit machines are still the latest and greatest in my realm. I would likely install to something like an AMD Phenom II at this time. How important would that be? Is it still possible to run FreeBSD/Dragonfly on a good 32 bit machine?

My initial use case would be server and development platform with PostgreSQL and MariaDB.

All comments appreciated!

FreeBSD 10.0 is an amazing distro, I have it running in Virtualbox on my Slackware64-current box. It has been a few years since I've tried Dragonfly so I won't offer any advice on that BSD.
The only problem I have with FreeBSD 10.0 is it is difficult to dual boot with Slackware. If you want to run FreeBSD as the only OS on your HD then you are good to go. So I dual boot Slackware with OpenBSD. I really love the simplicity of OpenBSD. Here is my dual boot set-up for Slackware, the last little snippet of my lilo.conf.

To set-up a partition for a dual boot (Slackware/OpenBSD) use the Slackware DVD when you're installing Slackware to set the partition as type A6.
The above partition scheme is sda1 as swap, sda2 as /, and sda3 as /home.

Thanks hitest.

I will be dual booting with Slackware. Can you tell me the cause of the difficulty dual booting FreeBSD and Slackware, and the advantage of OpenBSD in that respect, please?

At this time the target for a BSD would be a partition on a second drive (i.e., what would be /dev/sdb/ on most systems). I always use Slackware/Lilo with UUIDs and am reasonably competent at sorting out most boot problems and configurations with it.

The problem with FreeBSD and Slackware is that the default partition table used by FreeBSD does not play well at all with LILO. I was able to dual boot Slackware and FreeBSD when FreeBSD was at version 8.x. OpenBSD has no difficulty with LILO. You may have better luck if you are installing FreeBSD on another hard drive. I have not tried that. A dual boot set up with Slackware and OpenBSD on the same drive works well for me.

Thanks, I was not aware of that. After an afternoon reading BSD, I had mostly eliminated PC-BSD and focused on FreeBSD or Dragonfly mostly because I have had most success with it in a VM. Perhaps I should take a fresh look at OpenBSD.

Can the BSDs support r/w access a Linux filesystem such as ext4 for data interchange (i.e not the kernel itself)?

Since my experience with PC-BSD, as outlined above, I have had a discussion (exchange of e-mails) with someone who was a graduate student at Berkeley, way back when, and actually worked on the BSD project.
He said that while it appears to be gobbling up RAM it is not, per se, using all that RAM. It loads everything it thinks it might need into memory and when a user starts an application it unloads what isn't needed and runs the application(s). A roundabout way of
saying, it isn't using as much RAM as it appears.


Perhaps, PC-BSD is tweaked so this isn't a problem?
My experience with BSD is limited to my recent installation of PC-BSD. What I did notice is PC-BSD is, really, for all practical purposes, FreeBSD. It boots to a FreeBSD prompt (command line) waits for a few seconds and launches the GUI splash screen from which you can pick the desktop of your choice.
During the installation of PC-BSD you are asked what boot loader you want to use or none at all. I chose "None" and later edited /etc/lilo.conf in Slackware and had, at one time, Slackware, m$-windows and PC-BSD available from the lilo menu.


Ext4, no. Not at this time. The docs say it can read ext2 and 3, but that didn't work for me. I went as far as to re-install Slackware64 on a ext2 partition, but PC-BSD still could not or would not read it. Perhaps I was doing something wrong (wouldn't be the first time. :) )
OTOH, it had no problem see and mounting ntfs and vfat (I was using fat32).

Yeah, PC-BSD is tweaked a bit. I saw that you could choose grub as your boot loader when I installed PC-BSD in Virtualbox. There are how tos on the Internet on how to dual boot Linux and FreeBSD using GRUB.

I am posting a follow-up to my earlier post in this thread to announce my first non-VM BSD install!

I decided to go with FreeBSD-10.0, despite concerns about Lilo incompatibility mentioned by hitest. I did quite a bit of reading without reaching a definitive conclusion so I decided to explore with the installer and try to avoid borking my disk while partitioning - which appears to have worked!

Initially I created a primary partition with gparted, but it does not support ufs so used cfdisk in the Slackware64 install on that drive to change the type to 'freebsd'. That did not work as expected but I think it was due to my own incomplete understanding of the ufs filesystem, so I ended up deleting and recreating that partition using the FreeBSD partitioning tools. I repeated the partitioning several times and rebooted into Slackware to be sure that I understood what was happening (I did find the FreeBSD partitioning tools to be a little confusing).

I finally created 120GB primary partition (slice) #3 on this drive (two drive system), and a / and swap inside that, and installed.

I then booted back into Slackware64 which manages the MBR on that drive, and added to my lilo-mbr.conf:

Ran lilo, rebooted into FreeBSD! So in the end, multi-booting Slackware64 (drive2), Slackware14.1(drive1) and FreeBSD-10 with Lilo was pretty painless!

I integrated to my local network and internet painlessly as well. I have not yet run X or created any user accounts, but will get to that as time permits.

So far the only surprises were lack of vim and a nasty PAM error when I tried to ssh in as root... I guess it doesn't like that! But I am able to ssh out and sftp to my other Slackware machines on my LAN (all non-priv user accts).

Anyway - thanks to all who encouraged me and offered helpful advice - my BSD experience now begins...

Great :)

Awesome! :)