Derick Thomas

BSD is one of the very old operating systems out in the market. But they did not become much popular due to a number of reasons. Although it did not become popular as a desktop operating system, it is still one of the highly reliable server operating system. There are a number of BSD operating systems out there like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD are the prominent ones. Of all these, FreeBSD is the most popular one and is the base for many commercial operating systems like Apple’s Mac OS and Juniper’s JunOS (It is not a desktop or server OS. It is used in Routers, Switches and Firewalls). BSD has a very popular and flexible licensing, unlike Linux.

PC-BSD is a desktop oriented free, open source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD. It is not another distribution, it makes FreeBSD accessible to everyone. FreeBSD does not come with a Graphical Installer. It still uses a text based installer, which is very comfortable with expert users. But for someone new to BSD, an installer with a nice installer is always nice. Also, PC-BSD 8.0 comes as a Live DVD, which means that you can try it out before installing it on your PC. For this review, I grabbed PC-BSD 8.0 DVD iso from their website www.pcbsd.org. There are both DVD images and USB images available in 32bit and 64bit. 32bit DVD image is 3.28GB in size. I have installed it on my Dell Inspiron 6400. The configuration is:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
• 1GB DDR2 667 MHz
• 80 GB SATA Hard Disk
• Intel 945GM/L Mobile Graphics Card
• Bluetooth and Intel 3945 Wi-Fi

Installation

When you boot with new DVD burnt from iso, it gives you various options including an option to start installer and another one to start with a Live DVD. I chose the latter one. There is also another option to start with VESA in case you are having trouble with your Graphics Card. The installer DVD boots into a nice KDE desktop. PC-BSD 8.0 comes with KDE 4.3 as the default Desktop. It has a very nice wallpaper and is very nice to eyes. You can test the functionality of all the features in distribution. If you are satisfied with the performance, you can move to installation. Click with on the “Install PC-BSD”  icon on the top left corner of the desktop. Installer takes you through a lot of options, many of which are very simple. When it comes to disk partitions, be a bit careful. Select the partition on which you want to install and do NOT check the “Use Entire Disk” check-box. Also, check the “Install PC-BSD bootloader” check-box. Note that this may render your system unbootable if you use windows along with it. You can still boot FreeBSD. If you come across a unbootable windows situation, do not worry. Just put your Windows installation media and do a boot recovery. This option is available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. For more information on that, please check the PC-BSD Wiki. The installation screenshots are available in the following slideshow:

The installation program is very easy to handle and the installation process itself is very comfortable and smooth. It gives to option to select some programs during the installation like Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Web Browser, OpenOffice and VLC. Once installation is complete, you can reboot into the world of BSD. During the first boot, it will ask you for Screen Resolution Configuration. I had to manually select the display resolution, although Video Card was properly detected.

User Experience

The system is very cool to use. The KDE is very pleasant and you can customize it to your satisfaction. Most of the programs and applications needed for daily use and more are available in the KDE. The system is very easy to navigate and it recognized Windows NTFS partitions. You can play music, watch video and more. If you want to use Office Applications, the entire suite is also available. The default theme is very nice and icons resemble that of Mac OS X. The konqueror file browser is very user friendly. I am sure that you will not be disappointed with the KDE experience.

If you want to install any application, you can install it with a single click. PBI files can be downloaded from Internet. PBI files are equivalent to DMG and Setup.exe files available in Mac OS X and Windows respectively. It contains all dependencies needed to install the program. You can browse all the applications available as PBI files at www.pbidir.com

The Good

KDE which is included with PC-BSD is customized to nicely fit into the entire system. It is very stable and I did not have any problem for the entire week I have used it. The system never hung up. My laptop used to have very frequently with newer kernels. I think it because of the new graphics drivers which are included. The graphics performance was also very good. I have experienced the stability for which FreeBSD is very famous for. I use this laptop very roughly. Installs everything, uses it continuously and still I had no problem.

I was never comfortable with KDE. I used KDE with Red Hat Linux 5.x. I used KDE last time was to test Pardus Linux 2009 during last September. It however, left me unimpressed. But I have become a fan of KDE after I used PC-BSD. Especially, big titlebar is awesome. KDE is so tightly integrated with PC-BSD. It uses less memory compared to other Linux Distributions.

PBI files make it easy for anyone to download and install applications without the hassle of thinking about the dependencies.

The release cycle of FreeBSD is 18 months. So you can assured to have an OS which will stay for sometime without any major changes. And FreeBSD releases an update only if it is very stable and thoroughly tested. So you need not change your desktop every six months as with Linux distributions. One can argue that you can choose a Long Term Support (LTS) version for that purpose, but in my opinion, it is very tempting to upgrade when a new OS arrives with a lot of ‘features’.

The Bad

Installer does not allow you to add/remove some core programs. I do not have a printer and so I do not want CUPS to be installed. But it installs CUPS by default. Such a feature is not so expected in an OS with importance to simplicity.

The huge size of ISO file may discourage many people from downloading it and then giving it a try. I think there should be a version which fits on a CD with minimal applications so that many people will give it a try.

There is not much community support for PC-BSD when compared to major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. You can find most of the answers in the forums for your problems. I really wish it had wiki like that of Arch Linux.

The ISO image is compiled with a generic i386 processor support. I think there should be support for many architectures like it is available for Funtoo Linux. But these things will make a sense if it becomes popular. I did not experience a very fast KDE compared to Linux.

There is no GUI for Bluetooth configuration.  If you want to use Bluetooth extensively, be prepared to use command line. Google will be your best friend.

PBI files make it easy for you to install applications. But the size of these files is enormous. Can you think of downloading Firefox with a size of 80MB? For me, that size is not acceptable. I think they should reduce the number of dependencies included to make it small.

Another thing I noticed is about the System Monitor. It shows only one graph for CPU. Since my CPU is Dual Core, I do not know if the OS is utilizing both or not.

And lastly, there is no native Adobe Flash support.

Conclusion

Although you can count more number of cons in the above list, those are very insignificant, compared to the advantages it offers. Inheriting FreeBSD’s tradition combined with a very nice user interface, PC-BSD will not disappoint you. At least, it made me a fan of KDE from a hard core GNOME fan. If I am asked to rate this OS on a scale of five, I will give it sure 4.75/5.0.