PC-BSD - Review

We installed the PC-BSD desktop FreeBSD distro on a spare box in our office yesterday, and we found it pretty much to be as advertised. The GUI installer made installation a snap, and KDE 3.4 (complete with sound) worked right out of the box.

However, Dru Lavigne beat us to a review, and it’s quite thorough. My techs agreed that, at the moment, PC-BSD is just FreeBSD with a pretty face. Port management and other system admin duties are still identical. As expected, there are no BSD admin applets (yet), but KDE’s tools such as the KInfoCenter did provide system information when requested.

If you’re interested, the guys from The Linux Link Tech Show recently interviewed a FreeBSD developer on their show. They discussed running FreeBSD on the desktop, as well as the future of FreeBSD on architectures like PowerPC (Mac) and how FreeBSD system upgrades work. Click the archives link, select a mirror, and look for episode 80.