Comments on: PC-BSD 9 Review

By: Leta

Leta — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:31:13 +0000

Right now it looks like BlogEngine is the best blogging platform out there right now.
(from what I’ve read) Is that what you are using on your blog?

By: TIBOR

TIBOR — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:14:02 +0000

dear jesserac.
zfs +gpt need amd pc efi bios .
amd 32 bit pc bsd lite normal

By: smchris

smchris — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:32:58 +0000

On it right now with an old T60 ThinkPad with an SSD. I’m going to keep it for chuckles as a field trip computer for astronomy: Stellarium, KStars, Cartes de Ciel, Variables, Virtual Moon Atlas — 3.5 , Where is M13, RegiStax, and Cheese reads my “cheesie” NexImage cam. Nook, Kindle, Kobo, Calibre for some astro books. Back at the motel: browsers, email, and although the pbi currently seems broken there’s a port of Skype that at least works with audio so what’s not to like? It is a bit like being at an ’06 linux desktop on an ’06 laptop but since I’m sure the BSD community is way smaller than the linux community, I want to say that in a “glass is half full” praiseworthy sort of way. It _is_ a functional machine for my purposes.

That said, my laser printer is basically a WinPrinter. Just being HP it also has linux support. It doesn’t look like hp-setup is ever going to actually install the software it downloads in PC-BSD. And, as people have said, lots of luck on hibernate/suspend.

By: Zuber

Zuber — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 08:11:23 +0000

Hi,

I have installed PC-BSD on my (old) Pentium 4, 1.6 Ghz machine, with 512MB RAM, and 22 GB memory.
As my machine doesn’t have a DVD-R/RW drive, had to download and install the 700MB ISO.
It comes with LXDE, an archiver (GUI), no browser, no multimedia player(s), no Office suite, no Games.
Installation wasn’t slow, in fact it was quite fast!
About 30 minutes later, PC-BSD was installed.
It works fine.
The only problem is. I don’t have an internet connection, so I had to download manually the programs I needed.
And now I have Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, some games, lmms, audacious, vlc (though it is buggy on LXDE, don’t know why)…
I think I’ll be using it for quite some time!

Note: PC-BSD comes with the BTX loader from FreeBSD, I found it somehow difficult to boot it with GRUB.
So, I uninstalled my Linux distros (and GRUB), to install PC-BSD.
Then I installed Plop Boot Manager, and everything works fine.

By: Prairie Nyx

Prairie Nyx — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:30:44 +0000

You never mention, did you use the 64-bit version with your Intel CORE i7? Or is the 64-bit AMD only? (I seem to recall a specific mention like that on the PC-BSD website.)

Thank you!

By: T

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 19:18:18 +0000

Forgot to mention I also left out the src repository on the final very fast successful install.

By: T

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 19:17:01 +0000

I had it installed and working nicely. Installed within 1/2 hr or so. Then accidentially used e2fsck on the UFS partition while I was checking other (Linux) partitions -oops. When trying to reinstall, I chose ZFS and it got stuck on one of the system install packages. I then tried a UFS install and it got stuck on one of the software packages. I tried one more time without selecting the HP driver package or most of the multimedia packages, and it installed very quickly, I was surprised. It is humming along nicely again.

By: David Domincki

David Domincki — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:57:23 +0000

Good website! I really love how it is easy on my eyes and the data are well written. I am wondering how I might be notified whenever a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your RSS feed which must do the trick! Have a nice day!

By: Patrick Crosby

Patrick Crosby — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:22:02 +0000

I first tried installing to a 16 GB flash drive, usb 2.0 Took many hours– perhaps 6 or 7. Seemed to boot reasonably fast (considering) afterward, and looked nice, so I decided to install to a hard drive instead. Didn’t time the new install, but maybe a couple hours at most (3 Ghz Pentium 4, 1 GB). Runs fine now. Looking forward to trying the version of Macsyma that comes with it. But when I download a slightly later version (for free BSD) of the Opera Browser, from Opera, I hit a brick wall. Everything downloads, but I’m not quite sure what to do after that. Application installation on all UNIX flavors has always been a bit of a mystery for me. I need to change that, at least for PC-BSD. Then I need to get my feet wet with WINE. Mainly WordPerfect is what Id like to have. It’s still the best word processor ever.

By: Jesserac

Jesserac — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:17:56 +0000

PC-BSD 9 install is not slow, it’s turtle like, its sub glacial!! 3 hours in on this on an E-systems desktop with 4gig of RAM and its still only 84% done – stuck in “Installing Mythtv-024.1_1 (at 10% done) for over 45 minutes now. What in the HELL is the install program doing?? Seriously, WHAT can it be doing? I’ll give it another hour or so and then abort.
This is absurd. Odd thing is, I installed it OK a month ago, same slowness, but it went all the way that time. The only difference, is this time I selected zfs with encryption. Hmm…