PC-BSD rocks!
- 3
- Add a Comment
BSD began as the Berkeley Software Distribution(s) in the late 1970’s. BSD, Unix, Minix, Linux and, for all I know one or two more, are related closely enough that they’re often collectively referred to as "nix" or "*nix" operating systems. I’ve tried several "flavors" of BSD in the past which wouldn’t work for me (probably due to my deficient level of knowledge) but my luck changed with the most recent version of PC-BSD. I’m constantly on the lookout for a distro that runs well on older hardware and BSD has a reputation for being miserly with system resources. I’m happy to say that PC-BSD lives up to that reputation and is a very impressive operating system. I had trouble installing it, because it’s installation routine has little in common with the various Linux distros I’m familiar with, but by carefully reading the instructions on the page I was able to sort it out and, once installed on a 550 MHz P3 Compaq desktop which has 256 MHz of RAM, it was fast, stable, very nice looking and loaded with popular Open Source software. I’ve previously written about how pleased I was with KateOS on the same hardware; PC-BSD is very comparable in speed and performance and has a little more going for it than KateOS. First off, PC-BSD comes with KDE which is my personal favorite desktop environment whereas KateOS comes with Xfce. In general, KDE is more resource hungry than Xfce which adds some significance to the fact that PC-BSD is easily as fast as KateOS on the same hardware. Using KDE also means that PC-BSD comes with digiKam, my personal favorite Open Source image editor. On the other hand, KateOS runs beautifully on my 500 MHz, P3, IBM, Thinkpad where PC-BSD won’t run at all.
Two years ago I couldn’t find a Linux distro which I liked on older hardware; now I have choices. This is good.
3 Comments
Christoph
April 1st, 2008
at 9:47pm
YOU sir are bookmarked!!!
I just stumbled onto your blog and I love it. As a matter of fact I do relatively the same thing you’re doing in my own time. And doing it on a laptop fit for dinosaurs.
Plus i have two older desktops to use as well, my windows desktop is my better machine for gaming of course. But if I had my way it wouldnt be hehehe…..
Laptop is a P2 400mhz 128mb ram 6g hdd
Desktop 1 is AMD Athlon XP 1.25Ghz 512mb ram 20g hdd
Desktop 2 is Intel 933Mhz 512 mb ram 20g + 120g hdd (home media server)
Pcbsdbabe
April 16th, 2008
at 1:20pm
Hello there,
It means so much that someone as knowledgeable as you is impressed with Pc-bsd. The developers of Pc-bsd are working to have KDE4 integrated wich will be much faster than our most recent version has 3.5.8. So we’re very excited about that and hope for the best ;)
eldergeek
April 16th, 2008
at 3:06pm
I think it’s far more impressive that someone who knows as little as I do (honestly, I’m not so far beyond being a newbie) was able to install and use PC-BSD. Especially considering that I’ve tried two or three other BSD distros and couldn’t get any of them installed successfully. Like I said, PC-BSD rocks!