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KDE GUI Operating Systems Software BSD

PC-BSD 7 Released, With KDE 4.1.1 88

Posted by timothy from the repeat-not-dead dept.
Gonzalo Martinez-Sanjuan Sanchez writes "The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce PC-BSD version 7.0! (Release Name: Fibonacci Edition.) This release marks a milestone for PC-BSD, by moving to the latest FreeBSD 7-Stable and also incorporating the KDE 4.1.1 desktop. Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers, as well as a large improvement in hardware support and speed from the update to FreeBSD 7-Stable."
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PC-BSD 7 Released, With KDE 4.1.1 More

PC-BSD 7 Released, With KDE 4.1.1

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  • where's the Bonaccio edition?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      where's the Bonaccio edition?

      The Bocaccio edition? They stopped supporting that years ago. The last time I saw one, it was installed on a DECameron.

  • Nostalgia edition? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kaaona ( 252061 )

    Looks like 32-bits only. How quaint.

  • And nobody will care, because the thing is named "PC-BSD". What is this, 1985?

    • Right, they should have named it "Hurtling Llama" or "Stoned Hyena".

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by FictionPimp ( 712802 )

      Personal computer - blue screen of death edition?

      That's a horrible code name for vista!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, it's aimed at the desktop, maybe they could call it "Desktop-BSD". Except that "Desktop" as a word is somewhat anachronistic. Not only are small mobile form factors the flavor du jour, even traditional "Desktop" users are using laptops instead of "desktops".

      So, PC-BSD is an operating system aimed at computers which offer a wide variety of services for personal use. The target platforms provide a comprehensive set of services, as opposed to devices like music players or GPS navigators, so they are g

      • Re:Wonderful naming, there (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @09:38AM (#25038855) Journal

        Well, it's aimed at the desktop, maybe they could call it "Desktop-BSD". Except that "Desktop" as a word is somewhat anachronistic.

        And it is already taken. [desktopbsd.net]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Goaway ( 82658 )

        And how is any of that relevant in any way?

        • He explained that this isn't a desktop OS, but a personal OS. Then he broke down what personal computing has meant through the short history of computing.

          I think we all know what KDE gets associated with in the Linux world, and it makes sense to clarify that PC-BSD has more mature, realistic goals than 'to replace Windows on the desktop.'

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Goaway ( 82658 )

            And once again, how is that relevant to the issue of "PC-BSD" being a horribly, fatally bad name?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rs79 ( 71822 )

              Yabbut, you can put anything in the name with "BSD" and it's just fine thanks. Those of us who program these things simply go "phew".

              Besides I like the name. It tells me it's BSD that's been tweaked for a PC. So maybe there's a chance sound, flash and my camera will work.

      • Well, it's aimed at the desktop, maybe they could call it "Desktop-BSD"

        Like this? [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 )

      What, you would prefer Pornographic Puma?

      Or perhaps Vomiting Vole?
      Infectious Iguanadon? (presumably obsolete before release)
      Twisted Tapir?

      Yeah, these are MUCH better. For certain definitions of "better."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Goaway ( 82658 )

        The fact that there are worse names does not make this one good, you know.

        • Don't know if you'll read this days later or not, but now I'm curious. What would a good name be? What's bad about pc-bsd? Why are functional names bad? What are the alternatives to either functional or sassy? I guess "meaningless" is an option (Vista) too.

    • And nobody will care, because the thing is named "PC-BSD". What is this, 1985?

      Close, I think it's 1984 these days. :-(

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bepe86 ( 945139 ) <(bjorn.petter) (at) (kysnes.com)> on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @08:58AM (#25038209)
    7 comments, and no "BSD is dying"-troll yet? Slashdot confirms it, "BSD is dying-troll" is dying.

  • Fibonacci edition? (Score:4, Funny)

    by magus_melchior ( 262681 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @09:07AM (#25038397) Journal

    So the minor versions go 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...?

    ("One... two... FIVE!" "Three, sir!" "Three!")

    • It starts with two ones. Why does everyone always get that wrong :(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, better the Fibonacci sequence than the Mersenne primes.

  • Welcomed Release (Score:3, Interesting)

    by foldingstock ( 945985 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @11:06AM (#25040175)
    Its nice to see a PC-BSD release based on FreeBSD-7.0.

    Personally, I rather like the PBI concept. I got a little frustrated when setting up Firefox v3 on Ubuntu*, due to having to upgrade loads of libraries just to use it, which in turn caused many packages to become unusable unless they were also upgraded. I don't want to do a full OS upgraded just to use a web browser.

    With PBI packages, the installation is sandboxed in its own directory, along with the needed libraries. This does take up more space, but in the long run it makes for quite a stable system.


    *I like and use Ubuntu. I am not saying PCBSD is better or worse then Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution.

    • While PBI is interesting, I'm still want a decent package manager. A lot of package managers out there suck, but some are great. There is nothing wrong with the concept of package managers. (Fortunately PC-BSD lets me use ports, so I get the best of both worlds).

  • Why the obsession with Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @11:56AM (#25040989)

    Very, very often I scratch my head and wonder why there's such an obsession with the Linux kernel when it comes to desktops based around GNOME/KDE. From a desktop end-user point of view (and I'm an end-user), there's little difference between the two. The various types of BSD have great wifi card support, and most printers are supported by CUPS nowadays independently of the kernel. That's just about all I need, to be honest. Everything else I need is provided by software, such as Firefox.

    What I like most about BSD is simply that it isn't Linux. It hasn't got the baggage that Linux has. I can mention it in polite conversation without being thought of as a fanatic. There are very, very few BSD fanboys -- people using it tend to be older, and more mature. It doesn't get on Digg, and if it does there will be like 10 comments from people passing the time, rather than debating how Windoze sux!!!!1!

    This is a great thing. Perhaps it's just like Linux used to be 10 years ago.

    • Very, very often I scratch my head and wonder why there's such an obsession with the Linux kernel when it comes to desktops based around GNOME/KDE. From a desktop end-user point of view (and I'm an end-user), there's little difference between the two. The various types of BSD have great wifi card support, and most printers are supported by CUPS nowadays independently of the kernel. That's just about all I need, to be honest. Everything else I need is provided by software, such as Firefox.

      What I like most about BSD is simply that it isn't Linux. It hasn't got the baggage that Linux has. I can mention it in polite conversation without being thought of as a fanatic. There are very, very few BSD fanboys -- people using it tend to be older, and more mature. It doesn't get on Digg, and if it does there will be like 10 comments from people passing the time, rather than debating how Windoze sux!!!!1!

      This is a great thing. Perhaps it's just like Linux used to be 10 years ago.

      linux today has the momentum and the hardware support. i would switch if i could run vmware
      and if there finally was full XFS support

      i don't want to get into the 'which fs' is best discussion
      because i settled on XFS a long while ago and have been extremely happy since

      untill XFS is fully supported i won't touch BSD on my home machine
      also ... autoconf/automake source code tends to be developped and hence compile cleanly on linux
      while in FreeBSD it does require some serious fiddling
      another odd point i think,

      • i don't want to get into the 'which fs' is best discussion because i settled on XFS a long while ago and have been extremely happy since untill XFS is fully supported i won't touch BSD on my home machine

        Why exactly do you favor XFS so much?

        also ... autoconf/automake source code tends to be developped and hence compile cleanly on linux while in FreeBSD it does require some serious fiddling

        Not true. I've rarely had a problem compiling things that aren't in the ports tree manually (quite rare, considering there are 19,000+ ports) and those that I did have issues with always failed as they depended on certain Linuxism.

        another odd point i think, could be wrong about this one is that a lot of people learned the bash shell and the BSD's & solaris tend to default to csh or tcsh (i like tcsh but i really loathe csh -- no tab completion ? ) offcorse a chsh can fix that, but most linux users have never had the need for that command and most don't even know it exists

        You are wrong. FreeBSD defaults to tcsh, and csh is mearly a symlink. Not to mention if they are actually using a shell and not a GUI, they should know what chsh is.

        yes one can edit passwd directly but then you have to use vi instead of vim unless you install it with ports

        What? You can't edit passwd directly, FreeBSD uses shadow passwords, use vipw.

        • Why exactly do you favor XFS so much?

          best performance on large files that i've ever seen (3 years ago), i also always have been able to recover +99,9% of all the data
          when the hd crashed (i had a very flaky hd that was just over a year old -- goodbye warranty :( -- and crashed a lot)

          Not true. I've rarely had a problem compiling things that aren't in the ports tree manually (quite rare, considering there are 19,000+ ports) and those that I did have issues with always failed as they depended on certain Li

          • i never mentionned ports, offcourse they work they have been edited to ... WORK
            i'm talking about all those source code tarballs you can get from every damn sourceforge,berlios or freshmeat
            project, you know ... shit that's outside of ports

            Actually, what the OP wrote was "I've rarely had a problem compiling things that aren't in the ports tree manually". I've also had few problems, as both FreeBSD and Linux have been converging on POSIX standards for the last few years.

          • huh ? the shells get defined in passwd it has nothing to do with shadow (where the hashes of your passwords lie) and one can edit that directly (root user) although it's not wise !

            You can edit it directly, but it will have no effect whatsoever unless you run pwd_mkdb, so please, don't be '2 damn eager to reply'.

            • pwd_mkdb doesn't exist in linux, one just needs to restart his sessions by spawning a new child from init

              you're just putting more weight in my argument that freebsd is just that little much different from slackware to be really annoying
              mind you i do had the same grievances with solaris

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by geniusj ( 140174 )

                vipw is the way you're supposed to edit the passwd file - It exists in linux too.. On FreeBSD, vipw will run pwd_mkdb automatically after you exit. The good thing about pwd_mkdb, is it lets you know that you screwed up before shooting yourself in the foot.

                pwd_mkdb: * uid is incorrect
                pwd_mkdb: at line #4
                pwd_mkdb: /etc/pw.mXg864: Inappropriate file type or format

                Are you against the crontab(1) command too? :)

      • and the BSD's & solaris

        tend to default to csh or tcsh (i like tcsh but i really loathe csh -- no tab completion ? )

        offcorse a chsh can fix that, but most linux users have never had the need for that command and most don't even know it exists

        In the same way that most Windows users don't know that the "Command Prompt" exists. It's still not possible in either to do *everything* without delving into using a CLI. In Windows, working with anything but the most trivial Exchange Server features has traditionally required their CLI tools.

        It wouldn't exactly take a lot of effort to implement bash under *BSD (if it hasn't already been done, cue the reply with the package link), but it's still hardly appropriate to accuse the majority of Linux users of s

        • pkg_add -r bash && chsh -s bash

          done. :)

        • It wouldn't exactly take a lot of effort to implement bash under *BSD (if it hasn't already been done, cue the reply with the package link), but it's still hardly appropriate to accuse the majority of Linux users of some sort of ignorance because their OS tasks generally don't involve using the CLI.

          i've never claimed linux users are ignorant i'm just stating that most linux (CLI) users are happy with bash
          and don't need it changed and when they do need it changed they either edit the passwd directly (i di

          • It wouldn't exactly take a lot of effort to implement bash under *BSD (if it hasn't already been done, cue the reply with the package link), but it's still hardly appropriate to accuse the majority of Linux users of some sort of ignorance because their OS tasks generally don't involve using the CLI.

            i've never claimed linux users are ignorant i'm just stating that most linux (CLI) users are happy with bash and don't need it changed and when they do need it changed they either edit the passwd directly (i did that but it was very inconvient - combination of vi and not vim and qwerty keyboard layout)

            You could also just use usermod -s mynewshell username to change that, without having to directly edit /etc/passwd

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrSkwid ( 118965 )

          Someone that's chosen BSD over Linux has already realised that BASH is to shells what high fructose corn syrup is to Americans.

      • Re:Why the obsession with Linux? (Score:5, Informative)

        by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@@@foolishgames...com> on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:37PM (#25043737) Homepage Journal

        So go to the vmware site and request FreeBSD support. There was a forum thread about it actually.

        FreeBSD has two built in shells and several editors. I don't see what's so hard about pkg_add -r bash nano if you want to go GNU.

        The bash port adds it to /etc/shells so chsh works. Other BSDs include different shells. For instance, OpenBSD has a modified pdksh which is decent. MidnightBSD and MirBSD include mksh. MidnightBSD also has tcsh and ash (/bin/sh is ash in freebsd too)

        Dragonfly and MidnightBSD include mined as an alternate editor as well.

    • Clearly you like "underground operating systems". Where will you go when BSD becomes popular and everybody's heard of it? Plan 9? Enough with the "get off my porch" mentality. I 3 BSD and Linux. Linux for the hardware support, and BSD for the lightweight simplicity, init script style (which slackware modeled itself after), ports system (which gentoo modeled itself after), and ZFS support. Oh and licensing too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrSkwid ( 118965 )

        Leave Plan9 alone !!

        • I have a fondness for Plan9 and it definitely has its place in a data center. It's a wonderful system for anything distributed, but you have to admit, a large portion of their user base is the "get off my porch" unix users. I mean, those guys have a ridiculous superiority complex.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DrSkwid ( 118965 )

            We don't have a complex. It's just a fact.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by geniusj ( 140174 )

              Last I checked, Plan9 didn't run properly under VMware, which I think is a requirement for having any success with the geek crowd today :)

              Has that been fixed?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by DrSkwid ( 118965 )

                Plan 9 works in VMware for long time. There is an issue re. cd-roms such that you have to make a change to the config (disable it iirc).

                tbh. the geek crowd is not something we care about :)

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