The I.T Massive!

PC-BSD 7.1 is a desktop operating system aimed at the normal user and is based on FreeBSD. It enables fast installation of software and getting a working desktop running fast. It can be installed as a Desktop or as a server, however I fail to see the point of the server install for a desktop OS.

It can be installed by dvd/usb or install via network and PC-BSD can perform a normal fresh install or system upgrade (Unable to test) can be selected in the system installer. PC-BSD allows you to install to these file systems:

• UFS2
• UFS2 + Soft Updates (default)
• UFS2 + Journaling.

To test out the suitability of the desktop for a casual user I did not use the command line, except to gather information after testing.

PC-BSD give you a list of programs that you can install along with the system, these are the ones I installed.

• Amarok
• Firefox
• The Gimp
• K3B
• Desktop Toys
• Thunderbird
• VLC

These are the ones that where not installed.

• FileZilla
• Educataional tools and games (for kde)
• Software development kit
• Web Development Tools
• OpenOffice.org
• Opera
• Pidgin
• Ports Tree (FreeBSD)
• Source Code (FreeBSD)

The Love

These are some of the things that I like about PC-BSD.

• Very attractive/easy to use GUI installer.
• Installer runs in a Fluxbox session, with access to xterm for power users.
• Customize what additional programs to install before end of install.
• Bash Shell included in system.
• A run X in VESA in boot menu, for GPU driver problems
• Run display configuration wizard in boot menu.
• Display Settings runs on first boot (in the X window system).
• Flash player is installed so youtube videos work without any tweaking.
• Check of installer archive integrity before install.
• Detects and uses dual monitors by default (mirror)
• Intel & Nvidia Firmware/Drivers included.

The Display Settings screen that is run after install shows your details and gives you the chance to configure them. For me with my Nvidia card (8800 GTS) these are the drivers that PC-BSD had: NV (default, open source), nvidia-173, nvidia-96, nvidia-180, + list of every other available driver.

The Hate

These are some of the points on PC-BSD that I dislike.

The installer has no minimum password limit and only requires that a password is set, for example it allows root & user passwords of 'q' which is just really lame. A minimum character requirement would be nice at least.

The system reportedly uses a Pre-release version of FreeBSD 7.2, which I find to be a little unnerving.

I used the NV (the open source) driver at install time, then I enabled the Nvidia 180 driver after install. I selected the dual head option in the screen configuration program which seemed to disable second monitor. The KDE screen resolution tool would not let me set a resolution above 1024x768 after enabling the NVIDIA 180 binary driver. Something to do with the driver failed and used the VESA driver instead, I was not happy.

The advanced tab of the Display Settings screen allows you to Enable dual head support (Dual head for systems with one GPU and Two monitors, other configured via /etc/X11/xorg.conf) It enabled two mirrored screens, not my idea of a Dual head setup. I could not get a desktop spanning across two screens without editing configuration files by hand, which is hardly user friendly.

When running the desktop video configuration program the X server would sometimes not shutdown and I would have to force shutdown by pressing (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace) If I didn't already know how to do this I would be stuck looking at a blank screen doing nothing. On my computer the screen would sometimes get messed up on the video configuration screen as shown below (I have no idea why the Ubuntu logo is there).

Weird errorPC-BSD uses KDE4, I've tried to like it but I just don't. The admin tools are written in QT since the main developers are QT guys I could install Gnome but I've found running a whole mix of QT/KDE apps with gnome makes the desktop look ugly, really ugly. KDE 4.2 has a strange theme with a Black/blue menu bar and grey application background, its not really a problem with PC-BSD but with KDE itself.

Default Desktop

When starting some applications (mainly the PC-BSD update program) I found that sometimes they take longer than they should to load, leaving you to wonder if they would start at all. I had this behavior with OpenSolaris also but its no where as bad as it is on OpenSolaris.

The System Settings configuration panel for KDE crashed with a Segmentation fault which to be fair only happened once but I've found Seg faults with KDE 4 to be common with my testing in the past.

PBI

I like the concept of the Push Button Installer with each program being in its own directory structure under /Programs. PBI uses the .pbi files are are found at the PBIdir website. Browsing software via the web browser is much easier for most people than having to search through a repository system like the one used in Ubuntu.

This method of installing software is much more like other desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X, which I'm sure will help the normal desktop users that PC-BSD is targeted at.

During my testing of the PBI system (Sunday 12th of April 2009) the pbidir.com website was inaccessible and this raises the question if that one site goes down how can I install new software?

Default Security

The default configuration allows Samba and outgoing traffic by default. The firewall blocks SSH, X11 (the desktop server) and incoming traffic by default. I have don't know why the X server has to be listening to the network, this is a potential security issue but it's blocked by default.

The details of running network services are listed below.

[root@pcbsd]/etc(6)# lsof -i
lsof: WARNING: compiled for FreeBSD release 7.1-STABLE; this is
7.2-PRERELEASE.
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
syslogd 857 root 6u IPv6 0xc278fca8 0t0 UDP *:syslog
syslogd 857 root 7u IPv4 0xc278fd5c 0t0 UDP *:syslog
cupsd 942 root 3u IPv4 0xc2918000 0t0 TCP localhost:ipp (LISTEN)
cupsd 942 root 4u IPv6 0xc2917cb0 0t0 TCP localhost:ipp (LISTEN)
cupsd 942 root 6u IPv4 0xc278fe10 0t0 UDP *:ipp
nmbd 959 root 6u IPv4 0xc278fb40 0t0 UDP *:netbios-ns
nmbd 959 root 7u IPv4 0xc278fa8c 0t0 UDP *:netbios-dgm
nmbd 959 root 8u IPv4 0xc278f924 0t0 UDP 192.168.58.132:netbios-ns
nmbd 959 root 9u IPv4 0xc278fbf4 0t0 UDP 192.168.58.132:netbios-dgm
smbd 963 root 19u IPv4 0xc2917ae0 0t0 TCP *:microsoft-ds (LISTEN)
smbd 963 root 20u IPv4 0xc2917910 0t0 TCP *:netbios-ssn (LISTEN)
sshd 1120 root 3u IPv6 0xc2917000 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
sshd 1120 root 4u IPv4 0xc29171d0 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
sendmail 1135 root 3u IPv4 0xc2917570 0t0 TCP localhost:smtp (LISTEN)
Xorg 8125 root 1u IPv6 0xc2918740 0t0 TCP *:x11 (LISTEN)
Xorg 8125 root 3u IPv4 0xc2918910 0t0 TCP *:x11 (LISTEN)

There is a nice little firewall tool for KDE as shown below, it simple and effective.

Conclusion
I love FreeBSD and I tried really hard to like PC-BSD but I'm sorry to say that I don't. I like the concept of the BSD desktop but I feel its still a few years behind the Linux desktop in hardware support and you're likely going to have more luck there.

However the PC-BSD people have done good work in making BSD more accessible to normal users which is impressive. PC-BSD has some very interesting ideas for the open source desktop like the PBI install system, I would like to see more Linux distributions do something similar to PBI or what Linux Mint does. For the most part I don't think that not using the command line would be a problem since most tasks have graphical tools.

Videos

Note: these are the old version of PC-BSD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC4gsipGfQU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0q37X-MJzY