PC-BSD
PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD. It is an
easy to use solution which saves time and energy. Think of PC-BSD as a port.
Someone made a port for FreeBSD, KDE, mail, IRC, office suite, and
scores of other applications. If you want FreeBSD and lots of extras,
it is available as a nice little package in the form of PC-BSD.
They’ve figured out all the dependencies, twists, and turns, and packaged
it all up for you in one easy ISO. Well, two ISO actually, but you get my
point. But it’s not a port. Included is a fantastic installer. Time to
upgrade? PC-BSD will download the upgrade and install it for you.
It all just works.
You might call PC-BSD a distro of FreeBSD. I call it a big time saver.
Plus, it solved a couple of problems for me and allowed me to get on to
solving bigger and more important problems.
Why the move to PC-BSD?
A few weeks ago, mplayer started acting up. It would barf on the video and
cough up an error which didn’t make any sense. A reboot fixed that. Later,
the problem returned, and would not go away. No videos would play whatsoever.
In an attempt to solve the problem, I did a portupgrade -a, which takes a
while. With the upgrade to the latest xorg, I found that mplayer still
acted up. Hmm, that’s annoying. Even more annoying was a problem related
to the backlight, or so it appeared. On resume from a suspend, the screen
remained blank/black. The backlight was on, but I saw nothing. I could not
switch to a virtual terminal (e.g CTL-ALT-F2). CTL-ALT-DEL has no effect.
The only solution was a power-cycle. This was annoying.
Even more annoying was the same thing happened when the lid was closed.
My laptop was set up to not power down or suspend upon lid closure. It should
just sit there. After the upgrade, it started freezing, as described above,
whenever the lid closed. I found that set dpms force on would
bring the screen back. But the suspend/resume problem remained.
Oh, and the xchat channel tabs all looked the same regardless of which tab was
selected.
I was running FreeBSD 6.2-prerelease3 (if I recall correctly). Given that I
should upgrade the base OS before debugging these problems, I felt the move
to PC-BSD was a good option. Two weeks ago, I installed PC-BSD it on my
desktop box at the office (albeit in a VMware environment) so I had no
hesitations about it being usable. The only risk was: would it run on my
IBM ThinkPad T41 (2378-DMU)?
The install
I spent a hour or two doing some backups off the laptop and onto one of my
servers. While that copy occurred, I retrieved two CDs from the office.
Shortly thereafter, I was installing PC-BSD. If you are familiar to the
FreeBSD install, then you’ll know it’s a bare-bones type of install.
PC-BSD is a GUI install. It has a look and polish to it that will appeal to
many people.
I regret I have no screen shots to show you. They would be photographs
and would not do justice. You’ll just have to see it to know that it is a
very nice install. 🙂
Apps? What about applications?
PC-BSD comes with many applications. More than I can comprehensively list.
I will list the main applications that I consider important to me, and then
list the applications that I installed myself.
I asked PC-BSD to include the following optional items:
- Opera
- Firefox
- OpenOffice
- the ports tree
I know I asked for others, but I cannot remember what they were. After
PC-BSD was installed, I used the ports tree to install the following:
- cvsup
- Thunderbird
- xchat
- xplanet
- pgadmin3
- PostgreSQL Server/Client
- putty
- joe
- portupgrade
If you like using the FreeBSD ports tree, you can continue to do so. If you
would prefer not to, you can use the PBI
system instead. Either way, it just works. For example, here is
a screen shot of Settings | Software & Updates | PBI Update Manager:
If you click the Get Update button, you are taken to a website from which
you can download the PBI. When the download is finished, double click
on the file, from within a file manager. The upgrade will then proceed.
The following screen shot will give you an overview of the install process.
It is pretty much like every other install wizard you’ve seen. See
Installing Applications
in the PC-BSD Quick Guide for more information.
Screenshots
Here is my standard background, xplanet.
And here is what a few apps
look like when running.
Oh, and imagine my pleasant surprise to see this pop-up just as I was finishing
this article:
Want it? Go get it.
I’ve been wanting to try PC-BSD on my laptop for a while. I was hoping to
get a larger HDD first, so I could dual boot it with my existing installation.
Yet, I have no regrets. Over the next few weeks, I will keep track of my
PC-BSD experiences and document them. Watch this space.
Several weeks ago, I installed PC-BSD on a spare partition on my Acer laptop. Like you, I was impressed with the installation program; it is both slick and smart.
Two limitations however prevented me from considering at that point to migrate to it fulltime.
First, suspend/resume didn’t work.
Second, and more important for me, CPU scaling didn’t seem to be enabled. As a result, the laptop ran very hot and crashed once because of overheating.
Have you managed to solve either of these?
[%sig%]
cbrace wrote:
> First, suspend/resume didn’t work.
It works here. Have a read of the suspend/resume section of <http://www.freebsddiary.org/ibm-thinkpad-t41.php>
What I should add to that article is this entry:
# Mouse needs a device hint to work properly after resume.
hint.psm.0.flags="0x2000"
> Second, and more important for me, CPU scaling didn’t seem to
> be enabled. As a result, the laptop ran very hot and crashed
> once because of overheating.
Is powerd running?
$ ps auwx | grep powerd
root 1182 0.0 0.1 1320 916 ?? Ss 9:21AM 0:00.90 /usr/sbin/powerd -a adaptive -b adaptive
Try running it with the -v option to see what it is doing.
> Have you managed to solve either of these?
Yes, both. Keep in touch.
—
The Man Behind The Curtain
After further deliberation, I decided to hold off of further experiments with PC-BSD, largely because I prefer Gnome. Reading this thread on the PC-BSD forum made it clear that PC-BSD is unequivocally KDE-centric:
"pkg_add -r gnome2?"
http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10594
They consider installing Gnome a downgrade (!).
I had in fact tried installing Gnome on a FreeBSD v7beta partition of my laptop in December but the package repositories seemed in transition and various key files couldn’t be found. I resolved to try again once the final v7 has been released and things have settled down.
Just curious: what is your experience with Flash? Does v9 work on your Thinkpad? Personally I detest a lot of Flash, especially the animated banners, but once in awhile I want to see a clip of something, on YouTube or somewhere. In such cases, there is no point in being a total purist.
[%sig%]