PC-BSD is a user friendly BSD flavour; my colleague proposed me to give it a try, so while utterly skeptical (some of my hardware is badly or not supported with bsd), having some time, I fetched the vmware image and installed it along with vmware player. I used to be more adventurous with linux distributions, but this time I’m really not into fixing the partition table.
First of all, this was PC-BSD “i386″ (my XP is 32 bit), I’m pretty tired of amd64 bugs I experience with distros these days. The image boots up fine, the kde3 desktop is nothing new; I really don’t want to know how they will deal with kde4, let’s say, I don’t care for now. The desktop is nicely integrated, I could see the small customizations here and there.
Since most people DO need applications, I have read the docs about app management: PBI files are self contained packages, installation is a breeze. Go to the pbidir site, download, install, be happy. Just one slight problem here: the pbi site is nearly empty. No, I mean it: I do dig the idea, but applications I used daily on Linux are missing (while useless garbage, like wine hackery is there). After some clicking around I have found the build server with the untested pbi files: apart from some games and some multimedia apps, there’s around 100 apps, which is NOT much.
So, what’s next? Let’s fire up Ports, the bsd internal package manager (just a sidenote: I used Gentoo for a couple of years). We have a nice script for that in the graphical interface, wait a bit and then let’s open the console. I REALLY don’t like the idea of compiling shit all day long, but at least a Midnight Commander would be fine. After some jerking around with locate (ehrm, rehash, whereis) I felt right at home. Make install clean: dependency resolution is taken care of, cool. What’s not is that the install fails: gio-fam-backend refuses to compile.
Okay, let’s stop here for a sec: mc is missing from the pbi files (just like krusader; yes, I’m an oldschool fellow) and it doesn’t compile with ports. What’s this shit? After googling around I have found posts about the same problem (fam-backend), most of them remained unsolved. One suggested I recompile glib, did not help. Another one to update the ports snapshot and try again, did not help. Another one is that I read the update guide and do accordingly. It said (somewhere around 2005) that glib indeed has had some problems, I have to download a shellscript for the update process (to update Gnome… err, what?); okay, install wget (thanks for not installing it!), run the script, which said this freebsd version is not suppoerted. Fine. On the forum for a similar problem someone proposed a full world update (portupgrade -abP), apart from knowing how dangerous a world emerge can be, the note said, it will severely break pcbsd and will take up days (and I DO think this is true, we’re talking about recompiling nearly everything).
This was the time when I stopped messing with PC-BSD. Maybe I’ll give Freebsd 7 a try later sometime, but now this is not funny. I like stability, I like the desktop, but as a desktop user, I also like “using applications”. PC-BSD is good for Kde people (dying breed of version 3), but not for anyone else.