Monthly Archive for May, 2007

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PC-BSD announces logo contest

Published on May 23, 2007 in PC-BSD. 0 Comments

PC-BSD has just announced a logo contest on the Announce Mailing List and on the Forums:

While the new web site is cooking, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the logomark contest!

If you have artwork skills and would like to take part in the PC-BSD project, you can set your imagination free to create a logomark for PC-BSD. Please keep in mind that PC-BSD will keep its current logo, and the logomark will be a complement to it. Think of it as what the apple it to Apple, or what the window is to Windows.

Our logomark will be used for for the K Menu (“Start” menu), as well as for hardware, cool gear, and plate logos. Therefore it MUST be as high as wide. The PC-BSD team reserves the right to keep the FreeBSD logo as its logomark if it finds it more suitable.

The PC-BSD project will acquire ownership of the winning logo by assignment of copyright, and the winning designer will disclaim any trademarks and without limitation all other rights related to the design (paperwork will be required). By submitting a logo for entry in the competition, the designer acknowledges that he/she is the person that made the logo and is its rightful owner. The designer also certifies that the logo does not infringe upon the rights of any third party and that it does not violate any copyright.

You can submit your artwork until June 15th to charles_AT_pcbsd_D0T_org. The logomark should be usable in monochrome and color media, including limited colors (say 2 or 3 colors). You can submit more than one entry, but no variant of a particular entry (choose the one you prefer). Each submission MUST include:

- High resolution print-ready scalable vector format such as portable EPS, SVG or Adobe Illustrator AI
- JPEG or PNG thumbnail with a resolution of 640 x 480
- Design concept / description
- Submitter’s full name, email address

If you have questions, please get in touch with Charles or ask on our forum

Linux too vanilla? Try this

Published on May 23, 2007 in FreeBSD and PC-BSD. 0 Comments

Yesterday we wrote about a review of PC-BSD by LinuxHelp, but a week ago (15/07/2007) The Inquirer also reviewed this Desktop OS: “Linux too vanilla? Try this – PC-BSD 1.3: Basic, simple, does the job”

It went on first time, no hesitation. Even booting from the install CD, it found the Cardbus slot, found my old Xircom RealPort Ethernet card, connected and went online – which is a **** sight more than Ubuntu could do until I’d apt-getted it into submission. It cheerfully ran the setup program in 1024×768, the native resolution of the LCD. Sound, PCMCIA, USB, networking – everything just works. It knows it’s on a laptop and displays a battery meter in the taskbar tray – but that’s about it. No processor-throttling or anything: it’s flat out, all the time. I had to manually tell it to blank the screen when idle.

I was straight online after a very easy, graphical install. One reboot and it was ready to go, with only 2GB of my 20GB disk used – and that’s with browser, email, chat, media players, some games and basic productivity apps all pre-installed. It updated itself with some half a dozen fixpacks until it’s now at v1.3.6 or so – only one of which required a reboot. It now sports KDE 3.5.5. I don’t like KDE much – I used to, but I think it’s horribly bloated these days: complex, slow, fiddly, ugly and a bit flaky. Bits of it keep on passing out – but that may be normal for KDE.

However, it does the job, and it’s instantly familiar if you’ve been around the Linux block once or twice.

Aside from KDE, everything is quite responsive and it was dead easy to add Firefox, Flash, Java, OpenOffice, Skype and suchlike from their online package-download site, a link to which is handily left on the desktop. No fiddling about with repositories or restricted components – you download what you want then double-click it.

There’s a basic but fairly complete suite of admin tools, all integrated into the KDE control centre.

With no additional mucking around, I was able to get online from in bed then watch a DivX movie off a USB key. The only thing it didn’t do is mount the USB key for me – I had to go to a terminal, SU to root, make my own mountpoint, inspect the kernel messages for the device name and then mount it myself by hand. That’s a bit 1997 for my tastes, but I can cope.

USB key mounting does work in PC-BSD, so I can’t explain why it wasn’t working for Liam Proven.

Other luxuries which it doesn’t offer but which one might expect in a modern Linux are suspend/resume, power management and maybe support for the onboard Winmodem – but I don’t actually /need/ any of them.

Unfortunately, laptop power management (suspend/resume) is not working in FBSD at the moment. As the word “Winmodem” suggests, these work (only) on Windows.

Read the full article or the discussion on the PC-BSD forums

pfSense 1.2-BETA-1 released

Published on May 23, 2007 in pfSense. 0 Comments

pfSense project logoAbout 2 weeks ago the pfSense Project have released 1.2-Beta-1. This version contains a quite a number of improvements and new features, including

  • FreeBSD updated to 6.2
  • Reworked load balancing pools which allow for round robin or failover
  • miniupnpd has proven to work so well that it is now in the base install but deactivated by default (uninstall the miniupnpd package before upgrading to avoid duplicate menu items)
  • Much enhanced RRD graphs
  • Numerous Squid Package fixes
  • etc etc click here for the full list of changes/additions

    • If you want to see how to install pfSense or how to access the web interface, check out hese two video’s here.

    PC-BSD 1.3.4 Review

    Published on May 22, 2007 in PC-BSD. 2 Comments

    LinuxHelp has just (22/05/2007) posted an interesting and balanced review of the latest version of PC-BSD. Some of the suggestions for improvement (3-5) will be included in the upcoming version 1.4 (June/July 2007). Though PC-BSD is not a Linux distriution, it’s good to see that a website dedicated to Linux also pays attention to a non-Linux OS.

    This is the conclusion of the article:

    PC-BSD is turning out to be an excellent alternative to other popular Desktop OSes. After testing and using PC-BSD for some time now, I can’t but admire the sheer amount of work that is put into creating, developing and molding an OS for the lay person albeit with a strong slant towards FreeBSD. The fact that PC-BSD is able to accomplish all the tasks expected by an end user – be it using the Internet for communication, listening to music, watching movies or using it for recreation purposes holds it in good stead as a viable Desktop OS.

    Read the whole review here.

    Update (23/05/2007): There’s in interesting discussion on OSNews.com regarding this reviews:
    - Acquisition of PC-BSD by iXsystems (Oct 2006) hasn’t proved bad after all
    - People seem to like the easy of use of PBI installation
    - Quite a few happy users (incl. non-techy fathers, mothers, wifes – just the people PC-BSD is targeted at)

    A list of FreeBSD based operating systems

    Published on May 21, 2007 in DesktopBSD, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, FreeSBIE, Frenzy, M0n0wall, PC-BSD, RoFreeSBIE and pfSense. 0 Comments

    FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), UltraSPARC, IA-64, PC-98 and ARM architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.

    PC-BSD has been designed with the “casual” computer user in mind. Installing the system is simply a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes for the installation process to finish. Hardware such as video, sound, network and other devices will be auto-detected and available at the first system startup. Home users will immediately feel comfortable with PC-BSD’s desktop interface, with KDE 3.5 running under the hood. Software installation has also been designed to be as painless as possible, simply double-click and software will be installed.

    DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that’s easy to use and install.

    m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software). m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent. m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format.

    pfSense is an open source firewall derived from the m0n0wall operating system platform with radically different goals such as using OpenBSD’s ported Packet Filter, FreeBSD 6.1 ALTQ (HFSC) for excellent packet queueing and finally an integrated package management system for extending the environment with new features.

    FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC protocols, local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall.

    Freesbie is a LiveCD based on the FreeBSD Operating system, or even easier, a FreeBSD-based operating system that works directly from a CD, without touching your hard drive.

    RoFreeSBIE is a Live DVD/CD installable on hark disk. Its goal is to promote FreeBSD and make it an educational tool and a mobile desktop too.

    Frenzy is a “portable system administrator toolkit,” LiveCD based on FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware tests, file system check, security check and network setup and analysis.

    More and more up-to-date information can be found on the FreeBSD systems page.

    BSD compared with Linux (funny)

    Published on May 21, 2007 in FreeBSD, FreeBSD vs Linux, PC-BSD and X vs Y. 0 Comments

    Browsing some forum I came accross the following quote which I want to share with you. I don’t want to start a Linux-BSD flame war, but to me, being a BSD fan, I think there’s some truth it (slightly edited):

    BSD rules because it’s time-tested and stable. Linux peeps can’t even get their act together with all their distros and different userland apps.

    Picture it this way.

    BSD is like the mafia. Professional (stable), organized (one coherent Unix system), hit men who never miss (can last turned on for years without a crash), and who act like The Transporter.

    Linux are like Los Angeles drive-by shooters, shooting in all directions (many distros), not organized (no coherent testing on whether new versions of dependencies and libraries work with all the apps in the distro), not professional (most distros are amateur knockoffs of the real distros, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, etc.), and, although cool in their diversity, need to really stabilize ONE package manager standard, and fix “dependency hell”. An example: PC-BSD PBI system, which is easy to use, easy for users to maintain, and NEVER modifies the base system, ensuring system stability and coherence.

    ANd like hitmen, when things just don’t work the “professional” way (meaning, Linux apps or plugins are needed), they can get gansta dirty and use Linux Compatibility Mode to “be” like Linux gangsters when they “need to be”. Linux can’t be BSD, but BSD can be Linux.

    So, I think the war is over. Have your petty Linux gangbang drive-bys…but no Linux EVER dares to go into BSD Mafia territory (Server-land). Those that do, end up dead (don’t last more than 5 months turned on, while BSDs can last years).

    Soure: Linuxganster website

    X.org 7.2 hitting ports tree

    Published on May 19, 2007 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

    This is really good news. X.org 7.2 has hit the ports tree. Beryl and other 3-D goodies can now be installed on FreeBSD.

    Dear FreeBSD Users,

    Within the next 24 hours, the long-awaited update to the X.org 7.2 windowing system will be committed to the ports tree. This upgrade has been 6 months in the making and would not have been possible without the dedicated work of Florent Thoumie, Dejan Lesjak and many others in our army of developers.

    For the past two weeks the ports tree has been frozen while our developer community has concentrated on testing and refining the upgrade process. This is a major upgrade, but we have worked hard to smooth out the road bumps that have been encountered during testing so far. We believe that the upgrade is now ready for general deployment, but particularly cautious users may wish to delay their upgrades and monitor the freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org and freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org mailing lists for discussion of remaining issues that may be encountered by users.

    Please note that it will unfortunately not be possible to perform this update without some manual intervention. Please refer to the /usr/ports/UPDATING file to learn about the steps necessary, and the changes involved. One important aspect of the upgrade is that X.org 7.x is no longer installed in the /usr/X11R6 directory; instead it installs in /usr/local along with the other ports.

    If you are running an automatic port rebuild script from e.g. cron, you will want to disable that. In general we do not recommend automatic updates because of the potential to cause unrecoverable errors when problems are encountered.

    Thank you for your patience while we have prepared this change. The tree will remain semi-frozen for another few days after the import takes place while we wait for all the changes to settle out (the duration of this freeze will depend on any problem reports we receive from the user community).

    We hope you all enjoy the new X version!

    Kris

    Differences between PC-BSD and FreeBSD

    Published on May 18, 2007 in FreeBSD and PC-BSD. 1 Comment

    First things first: PC-BSD is NOT Linux. Both are UNIX-like systems, but PC-BSD is NOT Linux.

    The main difference between PC-BSD and FBSD is: PC-BSD is geared towards desktop use; FBSD has been created with server use in mind

    • PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD (6.1 currently) and KDE (currently 3.5.5)
    • PC-BSD is installed by a nice graphical installer, rather than FreeBSD’s /sbin/sysinstall
    • PC-BSD installs a bunch of pre-selected applications (mostly KDE), whereas one has to manually select packages during a FreeBSD installation
    • PC-BSD supports all the major package management systems that FreeBSD comes with (PKG, Ports etc) but has additionally the PBI package installer.
    • PC-BSD’s kernel has been recompiled with some configuration tweaks to better suit it for desktop use
    • PC-BSD comes preconfigured with a number of automatic scripts (i.e. to mount a digital cameral or USB memory stick etc) that only work in KDE. So, if you want Gnome instead of KDE , alas, but for the time being, you will have to install FBSD with Gnome.

    So, in summary, there is no real difference between PC-BSD and FreeBSD, except for the and the that come with PC-BSD. PC-BSD is FreeBSD with a nice installer, preconfiguration/kernel tweaks, PBI package management, pre-selected packages and some handy (GUI) utilities to make PC-BSD suitable for desktop use, so the user doesn’t have to worry about configuring his/her system, but rather install it and start working and/or playing.

    What’s cooking for FreeBSD?

    Published on May 17, 2007 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

    The next major release of FreeBSD, version 7, is one of the most significant so far, with amount of new technologies and improvement largest since introduction of 5.0.

    Some of the upcoming features are:

    • New sendfile() implementation, improved sosend()
    • TOE and TSO support
    • TCP socket buffers auto-sizing
    • Superpages
    • DTrace
    • ZFS
    • gjournal
    • gvirstor
    • jemalloc
    • New platform: ARM architecture
    • Security event auditing
    • New platform: sun4v (Niagara / T1)
    • New scheduler: SCHED_CORE
    • New scheduler: ULE 2.0
    • SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)
    • Hi-def audio
    • PMC performance monitoring
    • Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (802.1w)
    • New privilege separation capabilities

    More information and details on these exciting features can be read here.