A few months ago we were wondering what was happening with DesktopBSD (DesktopBSD; what’s happened). Peter Hofer, the founder of the project, has now put an update on the DBSD Forums:
Still, as some may have noticed, I have been able to work on some smaller improvements within the last few months. I now have the impression that everything is in order for a release 1.7, also considering that FreeBSD 7.2 has been released this week and should make a stable base system.
Therefore, I would like to release 1.7 as soon as I have some time on my hands. I would appreciate any comments on the recent snapshots (both i386 and amd64) from May 2nd. You can get them from here, as always:
ftp://ftp.desktopbsd.net/pub/DesktopBSD/Snapshots/
ftp://ftp.freepark.org/pub/DesktopBSD/snapshots/
Please understand that there is no room for larger changes such as KDE 4, new features or major bugfixes (unless critical).
Many thanks to Fernando for emailing this story.
It’s been quiet around DesktopBSD the last few months. It’s been a looooong time since the last stable release, and many months since the last publicly available snapshot. There aren’t any blog updates and the svn.desktopbsd.net subdomain is dead.
The forums are quite quiet; not as busy as they used to be.
I emailed Peter Hofer, the founder of the project, but have not heard from him since. Others are complaining about this too.
Anybody aware of what’s happening with DesktopBSD? Please let us know in the comments.
Fusselbaer has posted some instructions on how to set up DesktopBSD running live from a USB memory stick.
The instructions are in German and can’t unfortunately be automatically translated with Google Translate since the link is https. The steps and commands are easy to follow, but if you’re not altogether sure, copy the (part of the) text and paste it in Google Translate.
I’ve not tried it but I assume this can easily be adapted to make PC-BSD and FreeBSD live USB sticks.
Mozilla Firefox 3 is now available for FreeBSD.
Firefox is an award winning, free, open-source web browser for many platforms and is based on the Mozilla codebase. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advanced features:
- Popup Blocking
- Tabbed Browsing
- Live Bookmarks (ie. RSS)
- Extensions
- Theme
- FastFind
- Improved Security
To install Firefox3 from the commandline in FreeBSD, PC-BSD or DesktopBSD enter:
portsnap fetch extract (if this is the first time you're using portsnap)
portsnap fetch update
cd /usr/ports/www/firefox3 && make install clean
Vermaden has created some nice artwork for both PC-BSD and DesktopBSD.
Check these links:
CodeWeavers, the makers of CrossOver Office, have announced a new product: CrossOver Games
Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel OS X Mac or Linux PC (or FreeBSD, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, GvE) Whatever your tastes — first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs — CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles. CrossOver comes with an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing your games simple and fast. Once installed, your game integrates seamlessly into your Desktop. Just click and run! Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.
CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community… Unlike other CrossOver products, which are aimed primarily at office productivity applications (and hence maximum stability), CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology. This means that the newest games run faster and better under CrossOver than under other versions of CrossOver, or other version of free Wine, for that matter.
Jeremy White from CodeWeavers has made the announcement that an experimental build of CrossOver Games is now available for PC-BSD users. However, this unsupported edition should also work on FreeBSD or DesktopBSD, allowing users to play Windows games on their desktop.
The FreeBSD version of CrossOver Games can be downloaded here (registration required).
Notes
- Remember this is an experimental build!
- If you are on FreeBSD 6.x, you will need to apply a system patch from http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine to enable wine to function properly. Users of FreeBSD 7.0 and higher do not need this patch
The first development build of DesktopBSD 1.7, an operating system based on the recently released FreeBSD 7.0, was announced and ready for downloading & testing.
First, remember it’s an early snapshot, so there will be certainly some problems! But apart from that it’s DesktopBSD based on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. I did a first test, there are some minor quirks with the mounting tool and the scheduler is SCHED_4BSD, so it has got a performance drop, especially on uniprocessor systems. The first preview version will follow soon with SCHED_ULE activated and some other useful add-ons. So if you’re eager to test, you’re welcome, but remember it’s an early test! You can download the snapshot at the usual servers and we have pre-built packages for FreeBSD 7 on the server.
Release announcement | DesktopBSD-1.7-i386-SNAPSHOT.iso
Reptiler reports:
Currently I’m playing around with DesktopBSD. This actually is because I’m anyway playing with Xen, so I decided to use the time I spend on Xen to try out a few more systems. One of those is DesktopBSD, a version of FreeBSD customized for desktop-use. Thus it offers what we are used to from many Linux-distros today, ease of use and installation, automatic hardware-detection and -setup, KDE, a nice package-manager etc.
By the way, I’m not using the latest version, which is 1.6. The version I use is 1.6RC2, just because I had the image on DVD anyway. But I guess it’s recent enough for this.
As said, DesktopBSD is based on FreeBSD, which becomes quite obvious when updating packages, because those come directly from the FreeBSD-mirrors.
One thing I personally really like is the function to check the installed software for security-holes. This is simply done by comparing the list of installed software with one (or more, I don’t know the internals of those function yet) of those websites where they keep track of that kind of information. The gathered information then can be seen in the package-manager, which I think is a really nice function.
[...]
Overall DesktopBSD leaves a good impression after the first few tests. For those who always wanted to try BSD this might be an option worth considering.
Read the whole article on Nuxified.org
raiden.net has a pretty nice review of the latest version of DesktopBSD, 1.6
DesktopBSD, a derivative of Freebsd designed for desktop use, has come a long way since its early inception back in late 2005. Originally created as a way to bring the power of Freebsd as a desktop OS to new users, it has now blossomed into a desktop experience even the most hardened geek, or greenest novice can love. Back in April of last year we reviewed version 1.3 and gave it great marks overall, but with some need for improvement. So how does version 1.6 stack up against its predecessor? Has it improved any? Let’s find out.
…. cont.
and he concludes the article with:
So how do I rate DesktopBSD 1.6? I’d say it’s a lot better than previous versions. It strikes just the right balance between being friendly to the new user, and yet powerful and geek enough to satisfy the more seasoned user. The developers did a good job this time around and I think they should pat themselves on the back. There’s still room for improvement, but isn’t that true with any distro? But it’s not improvements to make it good, or even great. It’s already great. The next step up will be to make it exceptional. A hard rung to climb, but not if you’re determined to be the best there is out there, and DesktopBSD is easily on its way towards that goal!
The review can be read in its entirety here.
Similar to my
m0n0wall vs pfSense; similarities & differences post, I thought I’d also post a “PC-BSD vs DesktopBSD; similarities & differences” overview since I get so much trafic from people trying to find out what the similarities and differences are.
A common misconception about DesktopBSD is that it is intended as a rival to PC-BSD as a BSD-based desktop distribution. Neither the DesktopBSD nor the PC-BSD project intend to rival each other; the two projects are completely independent with distinctive features and goals. PC-BSD has introduced a new package management (PBI) that lets you easily install packages, whereas DesktopBSD has developed a graphical utility that makes installing standard FreeBSD packages and ports easy. Let’s have a look at the similarities and the differences.
Continue reading ‘PC-BSD vs DesktopBSD; similarities & differences’
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