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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.

Installation

After downloading and burning the ISO image, I had some trouble trying to get the installer running. It turned out the first CD I burned wasn’t good and wouldn’t boot. The second one booted, but when I got to the X11 portion of the installer I kept getting a blank X screen with my mouse cursor on it. Anyway after rebooting twice and trying the “xreset” menu option prior to the graphical installer screen the graphical installer proceeded to run. It’s likely that my particular hardware combination caused this issue.

The graphical installer is very nice. It’s reminiscent of the graphical installers on most modern Linux distributions.

PC-BSD’s graphical installation screen.

For the installation type I picked Workstation which is suggested for Desktop or Laptop users. The other option is Server. After agreeing to the BSD license, you set your root password and add a user. You’re given the option to have that user auto-logon, which I selected. Finally we come to the Drive selection part of the installer. I chose my 160GB disk and elected to use the entire drive. I also installed the bootloader. On the final screen of the pre-install configuration, you are given the choice to do an Advanced Setup, but I chose to just use the simplified version.

While the system installs, you are given a nice progress bar and a slide show of images and captions showing what PC-BSD can be used for. This is similar to almost all graphical OS installers I have ever used, except Mac OS X’s which just gives a shiny progress bar. PC-BSD’s installation was very rapid, only taking about 5 minutes on my desktop system (which is pretty fast).

Booting PC-BSD For the First Time

After the rapid installation, your system reboots and PC-BSD comes up. It provides a simple screen to hide the FreeBSD 6.1 boot details from the user, but with the press of a key you can see all the details.

Unfortunately on my initial boot my X11 configuration didn’t seem to work with my video card and monitor setup (nVidia GeForce 7800GT and 19″ widescreen LCD). Even though my mouse cursor was visible and moved on screen, the keyboard didn’t seem to work and I couldn’t kill X or switch to a virtual terminal. Not even Ctrl-Alt-Del worked to reboot the system, so eventually I hit the reset button.

On try number 2, I attempted booting using the Safe Mode option and the exact thing happened. It seems that PC-BSD did not like my hardware very much. While this problem could be specific to my particular hardware, it’s not looking good for an OS that is attempting to be easy to setup and run.

For try number 3, I selected the boot to single user option to attempt to check and fix the X11 configuration manually. Of course fsck ran and had to fix some things since I twice hard reset the system. I figured that the X config must not be set properly for my video card. Sure enough when I looked at XF86Config, it was using the “nv” driver. My video card is too new to be supported by the xorg “nv” driver so I had to switch it to “vesa”. I rebooted and now the desktop loaded.

PC-BSD’s desktop on first launch.

While checking out the new system I was finally booted up in, a PC-BSD Online Update window popped up informing me there was a new update available. So, I installed it. It quickly downloaded and installed the update and was done.

While playing around in the KDE interface, my mouse kept freezing for a second every 30 seconds or so. At first I thought it was a fluke, but eventually I discovered errors on my console terminal:

nv0: device timeout (22)

I did some googling about the problem and it could possibly be related to my motherboard, Asus A8N-SLI, and its chipset or onboard NIC. LAN was working, however.

I installed PC-BSD on VMware Fusion beta on my MacBook Pro and the installation went much smoother (no X11 problems) and it also didn’t have the hanging problem.

Anyway playing around it was more or less just a standard KDE desktop with FreeBSD under it.

Package Management

Other than the easy graphical installation of BSD, PC-BSD’s package management system is its other key feature. The premise of this package management system is to bring simple click-based binary package management to BSD. To this end, PC-BSD uses a format called PBI for its packages.

According to the website, PBI’s features are:

• Completely graphical extraction & installation process.
• Advanced scripting support - Use shell-scripts to control the installation process.
• Corruption detection - Ensures that a user’s downloaded PBI is intact.
• Library auto population - Grabs all the library files a binary may need for operation during the creation process.
• Icon Management - Allows developers to set icons for both the desktop & K-Menu.
• Program Error Detection - If a PBI installed binary fails and silently outputs a stderr / stdout message, this is captured and displayed in a GUI for troubleshooting.
• Easy Removal - PBI’s can be removed through the “Remove Programs” system utility.

So anyway, how does it stack up?

pbiDIR website where you can download many different installable packages.

I double-clicked on the “Download Software” icon on the desktop which brought me to the website, pbiDIR, where there is a bunch of PBI packages for download. I browsed and downloaded four to test: OpenOffice.org 2.1, Firefox, Netbeans, and Java 1.5. The .pbi files downloaded pretty quickly from the site (it has numerous local mirrors). Once downloaded, double-clicking on the .pbi file in my home directory (in Konqueror) launched the PBI installer.

Installing packages on PC-BSD is simple.

All four packages installed without a hitch, however Netbeans didn’t run properly, dying with an error saying it couldn’t find my JDK. Next up was to test uninstalling via the PBI system. I decided I would uninstall the Jave JRE I had previously installed and then install the JDK and see if that fixed the problem starting Netbeans.

OpenOffice.org running on PC-BSD.

The PC-BSD Software Management utility came up, and I easily and quickly un-installed the Java JRE. Installing the JDK was a simple matter of double-clicking once again on the appropriate package, clicking “Next” a few times, and letting it rip. It’s as easy, or even easier, than installing programs on Windows. Once the JDK was installed, I tried Netbeans again. Happily it worked as it should. It would’ve been nice if the PBI installer had noticed that I needed the JDK for that package to work (and even nicer if it had offered to download and install that package first), but overall I really do like the PBI installer interface.

Error message running Netbeans is fixed after un-instaling the JRE and installing the JDK instead.

One thing I didn’t notice throughout this review is any way to automatically search for and update packages as new ones are released. From looking at their website, it doesn’t look like PC-BSD currently has such a feature.

Final Words

Other than the install problems on my desktop, and the annoying hanging issue, I really liked PC-BSD. I would have to say they definitely have added something the BSD community has been needing for awhile. The BSD ports system is great for what it is as an easy way to install programs from source, but using a binary based package system is the way to go for the vast majority of users. Bringing a clean and easy to use interface to packages makes it trivial for users to download and install programs instantly from the web. It would be nice if they added some sort of dependency checking, but they are definitely on the right track. The PBI features quoted above says that there is “library auto population” in PBI packages, but apparently I didn’t come across that feature. Perhaps the Netbeans package I used didn’t have the JDK dependency set. Also PC-BSD needs to add some way to update packages to the latest version easily.

In any case, the simple installation combined with the simple package management makes PC-BSD worth a look for users who want a solid BSD-based desktop OS. No doubt as it matures the kinks with different hardware will be worked out. They have an active community on their forums so getting help with your PC-BSD problems should be fairly easy.

If you are looking for an easier to use FreeBSD, PC-BSD just might be for you.