Those of you who have enjoyed our series on the FreeBSD Desktop are due an update on the situation with the 7.0 release. I recommend against it, for now.
Keep in mind, as explained here at Open for Business, we are approaching FreeBSD from a somewhat less than orthodox angle. It remains first and foremost one of the finest server OSes in the world, and serves on the desktop almost incidentally. Frankly, if you really need it for that, you could find it all very much easier by installing PC-BSD. Their forums are pretty active and you'll find generous and friendly help for most things. However, for those who like to poke and prod the internals just a bit, I offered a look at the original product from my own viewpoint.
The difficulty I see with FreeBSD 7.0 is as much a matter of the
ports built on it as with the OS itself. For example, the current
X.org port offers precious little in the way of guided or simplified
setup. Yes, you will probably get a working configuration by using the
standard Xorg -configure command. However, on far too many
machines it appears there is still a great deal of work ahead of you
modifying it. You can upgrade from previous versions and your old
configuration should work fine, but this is not a good time to be
installing from scratch unless you intend to learn the hard way.
Sometime ago both the GNOME and KDE desktops required full use of
DBUS and HAL, a pair of servers which are supposed to get the GUI and
the hardware talking to each other consistently. In GNOME, at least,
this isn't working as it should. That is, you still have to allow for
the standard BSD security behavior which keeps the user from doing some
simple things. In my case, my DVD-RW is SATA, and the standard tweaks
of building the kernel with device atapicam, and including
the full GNOME startup in rc.conf (adding the line
gnome_enable="YES"), didn't help much. I still could not
simply insert a music CD and get it to play without other tweaks, and
even then having to put up with errors. The FreeBSD folks admit things
aren't working perfectly. I haven't had a chance to test all this sort
of thing under KDE.
The reason for not testing KDE was because I couldn't use my GnuPG
keys. Neither the GUI tools nor the commandline would permit me to
import my old keys, nor create keys I could use. Apparently I'm not
alone, but something came up and I simply had to have access to my
keys. My ~/.gnupg folder was imported without trouble
under Linux and worked immediately. I have no doubt this will be fixed
soon enough in FreeBSD, but I could not afford to wait.
If you have a working 6.x installation under FreeBSD, you may or may not have struggled with any of this when updating ports and so forth. I've heard few complaints from those users. Simply upgrading FreeBSD to the next release doesn't usually work too well. You may be able to import most of your old configurations, but some will not work. Installing as I did from scratch resulted in the problems cited above which are likely to be show-stoppers for most neophytes. Forge ahead if you enjoy the challenge. My personal failure to make it work hardly means I've exhausted all possibilities. Still, if you intend to use FreeBSD 7.x as your primary desktop machine, I suggest you wait a while.
Ed Hurst is Associate Editor of Open for Business.
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Re: FreeBSD 7.0: Not Yet
Before having the pleasure of using FreeBSD 7.0 permanently as my primary desktop, I had been a Windows XP user up until about March, 2008. During that time, I’ve read plenty of information online about Open Source operating systems and using them as an alternative. So, I decided to give it a shot with FreeBSD by downloading and installing their 3 CDs. The install itself was quite simple, however, the many little adjustments and tweaks that came afterwards took a little more time. This involved adding more groups to my user, allowing permissions for my CD Rom so it can be mounted from user instead of root, installing more fonts, configuring X to allow KDE to work, configuring PF firewall and setting up the rules, and of course customizing my kernel and rebuilding it. The learning experience was certainly worth the effort, and thoroughly enjoyable. I even mastered most Unix commands and their DOS equivalents. Once this was all done, I find that FreeBSD 7.0 is an excellent overall desktop, much faster, stable, and secure than Windows XP…and free. I can compile C++ programs on it with no problem, utilize all the availabe free software like Open Office, Pidgin Chat / XChat, GIMP, Gphoto2, and browse the net fast and securely. It is the best kept secret in the Open Source desktop world today, and more people should know about it and use it. The only items still lacking for FreeBSD are: Flash, VMware / Xen (using FreeBSD as a host), and many games / some commercial applications made for Windows XP. Otherwise, the essentials are there and in time should improve even more. In only 3 months time of intense use and experimentation, I conclude that FreeBSD 7.0 and Unix are the way to go!