Inside PC-BSD

The same boot splash as seen in the installation appeared and hid the boot sequence. Then, the system launched KDE and logged me in automatically. I was surprised by the nice sound theme which accompanied me into KDE. There is a nice welcoming sound and each action, such as minimizing or maximizing a window, triggers a little noise which sounds nice without being too overwhelming.

The default PC-BSD desktop

Somebody must love yellow flowers in the PC-BSD development team, the default background is nice but the PC-BSD logo background (which is also installed) would make more sense as a default choice. The desktop itself is KDE 3.5.2, and it looks very nice.

The first thing I did was to set my network. I wasn't particularly impressed with the network configuration tool that comes with PC-BSD. I could have used the KDE network configuration tool but I chose to use the console. The KDE console, Konsole, is hard to find in the menus and doesn't appear in the context menus. PC-BSD obviously wants the user to use the click:// protocol.

Once my network was configured, I had a look through the menus to see what software PC-BSD had installed for me. I was a bit disappointed by the selection. Firefox, OpenOffice, Amarok and Konversation were nowhere to be seen. I decided to install them. Because of my little knowledge of FreeBSD I was expecting to find a frontend to the package management or to the ports collection. I was amazed to see none of that, but a link on the desktop pointing to http://www.pbidir.com and called "Download Software". I clicked on it...

The pbiDIR website

My first impression was quite good. Konqueror opened on a website which looked a bit like download.com. I immediately understood how it worked. I was supposed to download the PBI file for the software I wanted to install, and then simply run it on the machine. Somehow, it felt very similar to what I was used to do under Windows when installing something from download.com. I decided to download Firefox and Skype. I found it slow, and I suspected these PBI were containing the static binaries coming with a lot of needed libraries.

PBI - First step

Once the PBI was downloaded, I clicked on it to launch the installation of the software. A wizard appeared...

PBI - Second step

It only asked a few questions, such as whether or not a link to the software should appear on the desktop or in the menus.

PBI - Third step

Then it extracted the software from the PBI file and installed it on the machine.

The "Programs" Menu

As I had previously selected the "launch K menu" option from the PBI wizard, the installed software appeared in the "Programs" menu.

The "PC-BSD Settings" Menu

In order to update or to remove the installed software, the "PC-BSD Settings" menu provides a set of tools, such as "PBI Update Checker", "PC-BSD Package Manager" or "Online Update Manager".

The PC-BSD tools to remove and upgrade installed software

These tools, together with the http://www.pbidir.com website, do not offer much functionality, but they make it easy for the user to install, update and remove software. I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is definitely something easy to understand for the novice users and it doesn't require any learning. It is particularly easy for Windows users as this is more or less the way software gets installed under Microsoft operating systems. On the other hand, I've always though that Linux and BSD package managements were marvelous and that the ports collection was really something good. I suppose one can use the ports collection in PC-BSD, but it is PBI which is underlined as the main technology for the user. I didn't find many applications on the http://www.pbidir.com website, the downloads were slow, I suspected the binaries to be statically linked... so, yes PBI was easy to use, but I'm sure there are ways to make the ports collection and the BSD package management easy to use as well, and I would have preferred PC-BSD to go that way.