PC-BSD 7.1 Operating System Review

By Jim on April 27th, 2009

The last time I looked at PC-BSD was way back in 2007. PC-BSD is another option for those who want an alternative to Windows but who might not be interested in Linux or Mac OS X. PC-BSD is an operating system that is based on FreeBSD and uses the KDE desktop. My last experience with it was quite positive so I was pleased to see that there’s a new version available.

Here’s some of what you’ll find in this PC-BSD 7.1 release:

* KDE 4.2.2
* FreeBSD 7.2-Pre
* Fixes to bugs in the Networking and Wi-Fi tools.
* Fixes to bugs in Linux Emulation.
* Better stability for Flash 9 for use on sites such as Hulu.
* Software Updates now encompasses the old Add/Remove Programs and Update Manager tools.
* System Installer now provides upgrade/repair functionality.

Full details of changes to PC-BSD 7.1 can be found in the changelog page on the PC-BSD site.

Installation
I had some problems getting PC-BSD running in VMware and VirtualBox.

For some reason it would install but then I’d get stuck at the log-in screen. Attempting to log-in would result in being bounced back to the log-in screen. Since I generally like to try an operating system in Parallels as well, I was happy to see it work fine in that virtual environment. Not sure what the problem was with VMware or VirtualBox though, it seemed quite odd to me that PC-BSD didn’t work properly.

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