Raiden's Realm: Review: PC-BSD 1.5

Review: PC-BSD 1.5 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Apr 09, 2008 at 11:31am
Section: Reviews
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PC-BSD, a strong contender for the top desktop distribution out there, has once again grown, going from version 1.3 to 1.5 in just under a year. In that time it's grown, prospered, and had it's fair share of growing pains as well. But version 1.5 is only one subversion up from the previous version 1.4 that we reviewed. So what makes version 1.5 better than its predecessors and worth a look from us? Well, let's have a look.

PS, if you haven't read our previous review of PC-BSD 1.4 first, please do, as it will cover some details about PC-BSD that haven't changed, and thus won't be mentioned here.

Installation

Well, one thing I have to give credit to the developers of PC-BSD, the install works just as good as before. I did run into one snag with the installer not being able to see my drives, but that turned out to be a problem with the bios not seeing the drive right. Once I fixed that, the installer saw and handled the drive with no further issues. Overall the install is pretty painless like before. Very new user friendly in every way, which is good. Sometimes that degrades and becomes complicated or obfuscated over time. This hasn't.

Just boot the cd, wait for it to load things, and then it dives into the installer immediately. There's still no livecd with PC-BSD, but that may change in the future. If given enough time I suspect they'll go that route as most other distros have. One thing to note though is that you'll need both install CD's to install it. If you're not going to add extra apps until after you've loaded the entire system, then you only need the first disk. However, I recommend adding all the extra applications when installing as they're all hugely useful.

Overall though, the install was so flawless that there's not a lot to mention here. Honestly, I can't say for certain if it was equal to or better than the previous installer (it's been 6 months since I had my hands in version 1.4), but I would have to cautiously say that I believe it is better. But the installer isn't the only thing there is to see about PC-BSD. Let's have a look at an installed system.

The Main System

One of the biggest reasons I believe that the developers chose for going with a new version of PC-BSD, was that they wanted to take advantage of all the improvements that have come along in the Open Source world in the last six months. Some amazing things have come down the line that would easily justify a new version just to take advantage of those. Especially the improved Xorg libraries, KDE improvements, the QT development platform and more.

But did these new improvements really help? You bet they did! Upon booting up PC-BSD for the first time I was greeted by the Xorg setup screen again, just like last time. However, what makes this time special was that I was able to go with the 1400x1050 resolution I knew my system was capable of. And not only did it do it, if I wanted to, I could have gone all the way up into the 1600's without any issues!! *gasp* I haven't seen a KDE distro do that in a while. Most distros I've seen of late only allow me to go to the 1280 max resolution my monitor is rated at.

But there's a way to get KDE and Xorg to go beyond that limitation and allow for the larger screen sizes without violating the monitor's maximum allowed resolution. It's called "desktop stretching" (or in this case it's shrinking), where you pack a larger desktop space into a smaller resolution. In my case my preferred desktop space is 1400x1050. Even though the monitor is only running at 1280, it still works and it looks great! So I'm now very impressed right off the bat with the new PC-BSD and the new code behind it. It's really improved a lot of things.

Another thing that really leapt out at me was that the system was not only snappy, but it just seemed more stable than the 1.4 version was. That's not to say that the 1.4 version was unstable, but 1.5 is even more solid than its predecessor.

Another interesting surprise that came during my exploring was that PC-BSD 1.5 now comes with Compiz standard! You need the latest Nvidia driver to make it work, but it'll work, and wow, the effects are spot on and work well without any lag! So for all you eye candy fanatics, this should be welcome news to you.

And on the subject of eye candy, there's been some noticeable changes to the eye candy, theme and icons in version 1.5, some for the better, some not. One of the things I did notice was that evidently the developers did listen to my last review, because the problem with oversized icons in the Kmenu and problems with the menu itself appear to all be fixed! Congrats to the developers for taking the time out to solve this. :) My only complaint though is with the theme. Can't you guys set something other than a "Vista'ish" theme as the default? ;)

As for the state of KDE, it's still almost totally pure like last time. A few standard KDE apps are missing, however the ones that are absent seem to only be the incomplete, beta, unpopular and in development apps that populated KDE for a long time. Those are gone, which really isn't a loss, but their absence is noticeable if only in the fact that the number of menu items is a lot less. That's not to say that PC-BSD is lacking any apps, because it's not.

There's not much to mention about the PBI system, as it's still pretty much status quo, however I've noticed that a lot more of the applications are more up to date. It's still not a complete archive of all available software for BSD, however the list is slowly growing, so that's good.

Multimedia support has improved. Of course that may be a side effect of the advancement of the apps that make it possible. But even so, it's a lot easier to do the things you want to do, and they're better and more stable.

For office suits, Koffice is included with PC-BSD. Not the full office suite, but rather just the excessories such as Kmail, Kontact and more. I'm not sure why the full office suite didn't make it into this release, but I suspect there's a reason. Even if you don't have Koffice installed by default, it's not hard to download and install Open Office from the PBI repository.

Now on the subject of wireless. There is some noticeable improvements in how that's handled. You're still up a creek if you have Broadcom based wireless card, but otherwise, you're fine. Ndiswrapper has evolved far enough to solve that problem for you for now.

Conclusion

Well, that's about all I have that's really different and worth mention over the previous version 1.4. Now I'm sure there's a lot of backend improvements, and I did see that the developers are now using the latest (or nearly the latest) version of Freebsd 6.3 as the backend. So it's possible that a lot of unseen changes have come about that have really helped improve the stability, usability, and performance of PC-BSD.

Now, I realize that getting a true feel for what's improved, changed, any bugs, etc, can't really truly be found by playing with an OS for only a few hours, so I plan to use it over the next couple of days to do some software testing and multimedia experimentation, so that might reveal a few other things that I previously didn't find. So pay attention to the discussion thread for any other things worthy of mention that I find, assuming I find any.

If you'd like to download and try PC-BSD, just click here to go to their download page.

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