TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

After a nice weekend away in Hilton Head, SC, enjoying the nice sun and the company of family and friends, I am back with another review of a BSD-based system. DesktopBSD 1.6 RC2, released April 13, aims to provide a system that is easy to use but maintains the power and functionality of BSD.

My use of BSD goes back a number of years (late 1990’s) and the latest releases of the standard distributions (Free/Open/Net) haven’t changed much since then. The capabilities have increased, but the look and feel of each OS remains pretty much the same. The original three haven’t made many usability strides since then. (I’m sure some BSD die-hards will have something to say about this. I’m sure I’ve missed some major ones, so feel free to enlighten me.)

In any case, it is good to see that others are stepping up to the plate to bring the BSD line more up to date with what the mainstream operating systems are doing. It is not necessarily about eye candy but ease of system use and configuration that is important. Perhaps the BSD camps do not feel it is necessary to have easy to use administration tools and completely ready to use desktop systems from the install, but I do. Clearly the possibilities are endless, considering what the latest Linux distributions have been able to achieve, and what Apple has brought about with Mac OS X (which has a lot of BSD-based code in it).

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I have been neglecting the BSD line of operating systems lately, but a new release of DragonFly BSD has come out and I figured this would be a good opportunity to try it out. I have never used DragonFly, but I used to use FreeBSD extensively (I still have it running a few servers) and I’ve also used OpenBSD and NetBSD in the day.

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PC-BSD is a variant of FreeBSD 6 that attempts to make FreeBSD much more friendly for desktop use. The installation is meant to be very simple and to give the user a fully working desktop system with minimal fuss. PC-BSD includes hardware auto-detection and comes with KDE 3.5. Moreover, PC-BSD has a new package system that is designed to install software by simply double-clicking on a package.

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