Thoughts on PC-BSD

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 1:12 am

I did an install of PC-BSD 1.0 RC1 yesterday, and it went very very smooth. it's definitely the easiest OS I've ever installed. Easier than Mandrake, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It detected all my hardware without a hitch, and loaded all the appropriate sound and video drivers without any fuss.

Installing applications from http://www.pbidir.com/ is a total breeze. It's even easier than installing .exe files in Windows if you can believe it. There's not a huge amount of software there yet, so If you want a program that's not in their repository, you can easily install via the traditional FreeBSD ports system. Give it a try, it still feels very young, and can be a tad buggy at times, but I was thoroughly impressed.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:14 am

Yeah, same impressions here, one thing I do notice about the installer is that it's lightning fast, it took 9½ minutes from when I popped in the disc to when I was surfing the web with Konqueror, very nice and for new people the partitioning is a breezy because if you're just gonna do a dedicated system, you just check the box that says "Use entire disk for UNIX" and click next.
As I got Dann to mention on the show, my mum installed it herself along with OpenOffice without any help on my part, besides the URL for pbidir.com.
Considering how young PC-BSD is, I think it's amazing how good it already is, it needs more time to be as mature as the major Linux distros, but considering how fast it's development has been so far, I don't see the remaining time that long