PC-BSD Review

By Jim on October 17th, 2007

I’ve always been a fan of alternative operating systems. I can’t help it. It’s in my blood for some reason. I loved OS2, then Linux, then Mac OS X, and now BSD. Yep, BSD. Yes, I know that Mac OS X is BSD under the hood, but it’s not quite the same as running a less apple-centric iteration such as PC-BSD. And Mac OS X also requires Apple hardware while PC-BSD does not.

So I decided to give PC-BSD a shot and I came away very pleasantly surprised.

What is PC-BSD?
Before we get into the review, here are some highlights from the PC-BSD site discussing PC-BSD and its requirements. For a comprehensive look at what’s in this release, see the changelog and the release notes on the PC-BSD site.

Highlights of this release:

* Moving the FreeBSD base version to 6-STABLE
* Xorg 7.2
* KDE 3.5.7
* Compiz-Fusion 0.5.2
* Support for Flash7 in native BSD browsers. (Konq, Opera, Firefox)
* Official NVIDIA drivers to simplify activating Hardware acceleration.

Minimum system requirements:

* Pentium II or higher
* 256MB Ram
* 4GB of free Hard Drive space (Either partition, or entire disk)
* Network card
* Sound card

Read the Rest