A quick overview of Desktop BSD 1.3 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Apr 20, 2007 at 04:32pm
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Reviews
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Being a huge fan of FreeBSD and a big fan of Linux, I’ve sometimes found myself torn between the two. I love FreeBSD for its simplicity, it’s structure, and how tight and clean it is. Linux is similar to that, but not quite as clean, and definitely not as tight and simple. Linux is by far a better OS than Windows could ever dream of being, but compared to FreeBSD, it’s lacked a few things. At least in my book. However, that’s not to say that FreeBSD is the goose that laid the golden egg either.
Let me explain a little. To me, having a structured computing environment has always been important. FreeBSD has that in the way it’s constructed. A is A and always will be A. In Linux, A is A, but can also be B and C sometimes, which to a new user can get confusing, and for a more experienced user, it can become frustrating at times. However, that’s not to say that FreeBSD hasn’t also had a few failings. Now before anybody goes and thinks that I’m waffling between the two OS’s, I’m actually trying to make a point. That point is that while each is great, and FreeBSD is better in my opinion, they all have their own shortcomings.
With FreeBSD for a long time, it’s biggest shortcoming has been a lack of a good desktop OS presence. It’s an awesome, very durable and solid server OS. But despite its potential to be an awesome desktop OS as well, FreeBSD has never really provided the end user with a “simple” solution to setting it up as such. You could still do it, but you had to go through a lot of hoops to get there. While that is an advantage to those wanting to learn the OS, most users don’t have that level of patience, and some don’t even want to learn it at all. They just want to turn on the computer, click a few icons and not have to think about anything they do on the computer. When they want something, they want it now and it had better be easy to get there.
Enter, DesktopBSD.
It does for FreeBSD what Ubuntu has done for Linux, by providing a simple install, a simple setup, and a surprising ease of use. Here’s my test system.
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
1gb PC2700
Generic DVDrom
Plextor CD-RW
60gb HD
ATI 9250
Logitech G7 Wireless Mouse
AOC 17” CRT monitor
Onboard VT8235 AC97 sound card
Realtek nic card
Upon booting the CD I was immediately greeted by the installer screen. No live cd anywhere here to let you test the waters before installing. It’s no major loss, but it does seem out of place given how many other linux distros do that now. The installer asked me how I wanted to slice and partition my drive. This is pretty standard in a FreeBSD install, however, it didn’t give me a chance to customize the slices. Not sure why, but I guess it was all in the name of user friendliness.
It then went about its business of installing the OS after asking a few other simple questions. Install time was about 20 minutes. After this it asked me to reboot. I simply kicked out the install disk and let it reboot. When the machine booted again, I was greeted by a set of setup screens asking me for my time zone, users for the machine, root password, and a few other simple things. So far all the questions its asked, with maybe the exception of the disk partitioner, were all very straight forward and simple enough that the average joe could understand them. Once this short list of questions was done, I was greeted by a login screen. Off on the left side was my list of users, and on the right was the username and password boxes. If you click on a user on the left, it automatically puts that username into the username field on the right.
Another interesting surprise was the menu screen. It offered you a list of things you could do at login. There was a sessions list, the options for a remote login, console login, and shutdown. I’m not sure what the Remote Login does at this time and it will likely take some digging to find out. But I would suspect it has something to do with a terminal services type connection to the machine. The console login really did nothing but drop me into my default window manager. That may have happened more due to user error than anything as I’ve never encountered that kind of login option on a graphical interface before.
Under the sessions list I found six basic session types:
Default
Custom
Kde
Mwm
Wtm
Failsafe
As you can see, DesktopBSD comes with KDE by default, and 2 other very light weight window managers. If you were to install another window manager, such as Gnome or Xfce, those would appear in the sessions list as well. Once you select one however, you’re not locked into it. You can switch back and forth between window managers at your preference. If you have need to be in several different window managers at the same time, you have six desktops available to you (available by pressing ctrl-F7 through F12) in which you can either run side by side copies of one window manager, or entirely different window managers side by side. I actually found that rather interesting.
My preferred window manager is KDE, so I logged in with that and found a nearly pure KDE environment with almost no custom tweaking at all. Just a nearly complete default install of KDE. I tend to be somewhat of a PC purist in many respects, so this is a great thing in my opinion. Only a few things were different than a truly generic install of KDE, but nothing really to get into a fuss over. Oddly, they’re things you’ll never use anyways unless you’re an extreme power user, with exception of the games of course, but those won’t be severely missed. I think they did this more out of lack of space on the setup cd than an actual need to deprive you of your solitaire or mahjong. 
Further investigating found that even the control center was relatively untouched!! No oversimplifying there either. Just a nearly pure KDE Control Center. On the desktop was also a couple other extra surprises. Konqueror was already setup to browse samba shares and with a simple click of the mouse, I was browsing all my windows shares on the network. No setup required at all!! Now that’s impressive. There’s also links to ample documentation to get you started, a link to the file manager and your home directory, and even one more surprise. On the desktop is a cute little shipping box shaped icon marked “Software”. This starts a program called “Package Manger”, a cross between cvsup and the ports/package install system normally accessed from the console. With this program, things such as movie players like Xine and Mplayer, or audio players like XMMS and the like can be installed or the whole system upgraded with what is essentially a one click proceedure. The whole system worked beautifully and while it did take a little while to download all the ports, (your root password may be required several times during the use of this) installation was a breeze.
The only glitches I ran into with this graphical updating tool were not really caused by the program itself or DesktopBSD. They were simple issues that are spawned from recent changes to the ports tree due to the reorganization of a number of packages which confused the poor program. Since those kind of major restructurings of the ports tree are rare, I’m going to consider this a fluke, and one that’s reasonably easy to get around. And since changes this drastic are unlikely to happen again anytime soon, and are essentially rare, I’m going to say that after you get past the initial bumps, and in near future versions, all problems like this will be solved, making your use of the graphical package manager easy and painless. There were a few other small glitches here and there that really aren’t worth mentioning and have likely already been well addressed in the DesktopBSD bug tracking list, so I’ll save you the details. On top of that they’re only first time annoyances and once you get past them, you shouldn’t see them ever again. Really overall, I like DesktopBSD. It’s FreeBSD with Xwindows and KDE and all that without the hassle of manually compiling, installing and configuring any of them. It’s essentially just “install, click and go”. Even all my wireless stuff worked right out of the box with no glitches!!
I’d give DesktopBSD a gracious 8/10 with two points being deducted for work that still needs to be done. It’s very usable now, but could still serve to grow just a little bit. So if you want to start using it now, feel free to. It’s ready to go, and the best part is, it only stands to get better as time goes on! 
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