Hi guys,

I know this is a LINUX forum but I am sure that many of you use PC-BSD or freebsd. What do you guys think about this Operating System? Do you like? is it hard to find programs? I installed it on my laptop as a virtual machine and I like it so far. Please share your thoughts.
Thanks

Pc-BSD is a user friendly BSD distribution. iXsystem is behind its releases and they have their own apps store with binary packages for you to install. They pretty much have everything you need for everyday computing just like in Linux or Solaris.

You can also use the FreeBSD ports if you are into compiling from source but this is usually more time consuming.

Good luck to you!

The BSD's have been around for a while. They have been the backbone of many server farms and well trusted by admins. As noted, PC-BSD is more for the new user.

Ok thank you guys. I think I am going to give it a try... Thanks! any other comments are greatly appreciated.

Dru Lavigne, a FreeBSD personality refers to PC-BSD to be for FreeBSD what Ubuntu is to Debian. I think it make sence, kind of.

Good luck to you.

are all Linux and Unix commands similar? I was playing around with PC-BSD and I noticed that fdisk -l does not work. I also noticed that after installing HTOP from the Cafe software center, it would work with my user name but if I run a terminal as ROOT it will not run. why is that? (Run terminal as root by typing 'su' hitting enter and typing my root password. Thanks

The commands are similar, but not identical, accross different flavors of *nix. In particular, Linux's commands tend to use System V style syntax whereas the BSDs use BSD styles. So there are different versions of commands like ps, grep, etc. that are more or less compatible, but have their own little quirks or support different options.

As for your htop problem, does it report an error message when you try to run it as root?

Also, there's a BSD forum on this site that might be worth checking out if you have more BSD questions (as you note, the BSDs aren't Linux).

I liken PC-BSD to be for FreeBSD what Fedora is to RedHat.

Best regards

About Unix/Linux similarity: originally there were two "kinds" of Unixes: the Berkeley-unix (BSD) and AT&T-unix. When Linux came along, it was made closer to AT&T-unix (System V).

The commands and system calls were a bit different, but I guess, in all the years they gave grown more apart.

@turboscrew

Almost all of these UNIX commands are depracated on Linux:
http://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011...-replacements/

Funny, I haven't even heard. I've happily used the depracated commands on Mint, Ubuntu and Debian. I haven't seen any notices about that either.

Some of them (ifconfig) has been removed/deprecated on Fedora 18 of I recall correctly, dunno about other distros/commands.

I think PC-BSD has allot of promise. It is a very easy to use system, its fast, stable, and secure. PC-BSD has 3 things going for it that i wish i had on desktop linux. The first being the ZFS filesytem, it shines like no other if you have 8+ gigs a ram in you machine. I ZFS is the filesystem and volume manger. it is feature rich (as it is a networking filesytem). i like how it has a cahce that it stores in your ram,it will eat all the ram it can unless you cap it. it never apears to slow down though. its better to use your ram than just let it sit there IMO The second would be PBI package management. normally in FreeBSD everything is dumped to /usr/local(the FreeBSD version of /usr/bin). with PBI there is a directory called /usr/pbi. inside of this there will be a directory for all your applications installed via PC-BSD'S PBI packages. these directory's not only contain the application but a separate copy of all the dependices and libraries required(libraries that are not contained in FreeBSD's base system that is). there will also be a /etc directory in many of the directory's because it stores it config files there as well instead of appending them to the actual file or creating a new one. so hypothetically if you install apache web server the web servers root directory is not /var/www/ but instead it is /usr/pbi/apache/var/www. a little bit of disk space for alot of piece of mind knowing nothing will harm another on a PC-BSD install. the third reason, jails. jails are FreeBSD's genius idea of "operating system level virtualization. what this dose is creates a separate bare minimal FreeBSD system(all but the kernel) in /usr/jails. it is not accessible from the host FreeBSD and vice versa. it has its own set of users and its own root user. in order to access the jail you chroot into it. now PC-BSD has something called a ports jail which is kinda like a container without a lid. it lets you install graphical programs(From FreeBSD ports Tree or pkg_add) into the jail and run them on the same screen. Jails provide better performance than a type 1 hypervisor or even paravirtulization. The userspace applications are running directly on the FreeBSD kernel 100% hardware and filesystem performance. you can even build a linx jail (debain and getoo are the 2 choices now) they will run directly on the FreeBSD kernel (PC-BSD bootstraps the linux compatibility module). it even comes with the linux version of adobe flash configured out of box. Out of box PC-BSD is heavily configured and optimized for desktop use. i learned to configure FreeBSD for Desktop by Studying PC-BSD.

There are problems of coarse though. PC-BSD lacks the shiny polish of allot of newer linux disros. its hardware support is lacking. and X.org dose not perform as well as on linux.

all in all i like it though. quite allot actully.

---------- Post added 03-23-13 at 11:45 PM ----------

I think PC-BSD has allot of promise. It is a very easy to use system, its fast, stable, and secure. PC-BSD has 3 things going for it that i wish i had on desktop linux. The first being the ZFS filesytem, it shines like no other if you have 8+ gigs a ram in you machine. I ZFS is the filesystem and volume manger. it is feature rich (as it is a networking filesytem). i like how it has a cahce that it stores in your ram,it will eat all the ram it can unless you cap it. it never apears to slow down though. its better to use your ram than just let it sit there IMO The second would be PBI package management. normally in FreeBSD everything is dumped to /usr/local(the FreeBSD version of /usr/bin). with PBI there is a directory called /usr/pbi. inside of this there will be a directory for all your applications installed via PC-BSD'S PBI packages. these directory's not only contain the application but a separate copy of all the dependices and libraries required(libraries that are not contained in FreeBSD's base system that is). there will also be a /etc directory in many of the directory's because it stores it config files there as well instead of appending them to the actual file or creating a new one. so hypothetically if you install apache web server the web servers root directory is not /var/www/ but instead it is /usr/pbi/apache/var/www. a little bit of disk space for alot of piece of mind knowing nothing will harm another on a PC-BSD install. the third reason, jails. jails are FreeBSD's genius idea of "operating system level virtualization. what this dose is creates a separate bare minimal FreeBSD system(all but the kernel) in /usr/jails. it is not accessible from the host FreeBSD and vice versa. it has its own set of users and its own root user. in order to access the jail you chroot into it. now PC-BSD has something called a ports jail which is kinda like a container without a lid. it lets you install graphical programs(From FreeBSD ports Tree or pkg_add) into the jail and run them on the same screen. Jails provide better performance than a type 1 hypervisor or even paravirtulization. The userspace applications are running directly on the FreeBSD kernel 100% hardware and filesystem performance. you can even build a linx jail (debain and getoo are the 2 choices now) they will run directly on the FreeBSD kernel (PC-BSD bootstraps the linux compatibility module). it even comes with the linux version of adobe flash configured out of box. Out of box PC-BSD is heavily configured and optimized for desktop use. i learned to configure FreeBSD for Desktop by Studying PC-BSD.

There are problems of coarse though. PC-BSD lacks the shiny polish of allot of newer linux disros. its hardware support is lacking. and X.org dose not perform as well as on linux.

all in all i like it though. quite allot actully.