I wish I could share the joy of a newly installed perfectly functioning DesktopBSD system. But, neither the installation nor the end result comes anywhere close to that.

1) The installation starts with an ultimately annoying, uncontrollable run-up screen. Just because this problem have been swept under the rug in the past thirty years, it is not less waxing when you really wish to grab the disappearing information.

2) For a 17″ 1280×1024 CRT monitor the only available resolution is 1400×1050 whereas I usually set it to 1152×864.

3) In the configuration phase following the first restart the system is asking for the second CD or the DVD, but it is unable to recognize the very same DVD located in the very same drive then it was used during the installation.

4) The installed system is KDE dominated so much so that the two vitally most important items are unreachable, specifically, configuring the Internet access through PPPoE, and using a terminal window. What is the use of all those Internet applications if Internet access
is denied? How one can deal with any system, or configuration-related issues if no terminal window is available?

I feel being caged in with this monster that does not allow me either to look into the system, or establish any contact with the outside word. Gentlemen, is this an acceptable state?! Any idea how to brake free??

Hey crybabies, a BSD with such an “idiot-friendly” desktop environment as KDE is simply ridiculous. It should have either XFCE or LXDE.

BTW, FreeBSD is for servers, not for home PCs. Forget about them. Use Linux, instead.

There are many wonderful Linux distros with XFCE: PCLinuxOS, Dreamlinux, Wolvix, etc.. Search http://www.distrowatch.com for details.

Byebye DesktopBSD! Do the PC world a favor: never come back!

Hi, could be wrong but the reason you might have been having issues installing BSD on your systems could be related to this (from the pcbsd guide) :
“Be aware that BSD operating systems, and hence PC-BSD, only recognise primary partitions and consider any logical partitions as a whole primary partition. Trying to install on a logical partition will convert your extended partition into a primary partition and erase all logical partitions of your system. PC-BSD can be installed on any primary partition; it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the first one. Be careful and make sure you have a backup of your data.”

Just a thought and thanks for the reviews!

Im a newbie in these things and I have windows XP,pcBSD 7.1.1 and Ubuntu 9.04 in the same hdd (plus a partition for files).
I installed them in that order: first XP, then pcBSD and Ubuntu and its grub in the last place.
The truth is that I can see my pcBSD partition from linux (read only, no writting), but I cant see my ext4 linux partitions from pcBSD (Ive got 2 of them, one mounts at / and the other one mounts at /home), but thats one of the reasons why I create another extended logic partition in FAT32, just to share files among my 3 OSes

I will miss desktopBSD , Its a real shame

Even though I am a Linux user (Ubuntu) I have kept across the news of Desktop BSD. I am also sad to see it go. I preferred Desktop BSD to PCBSD but it didn’t seem to have the momentum.

Hi Dragonmouth,

I didn’t pre-create the slices; just created one new partition using GParted (unformatted, as GParted doesn’t/didn’t support creation of UFS) at the end of my primary slave disk, of which the remainder was filled with Ext 3 partitions and a Linux swap partition. I then ran the Desktop BSD installer and pointed it at that unformatted partition; then created the slices from within the installer. It’s probably not relevant to the discussion, but I skipped the bootloader install, as I already had GRUB on the machine.

It was a long time ago that I installed Desktop BSD, so I don’t remember the exact details, but I had no problems at all with it. Your posts were actually the first I’d heard about Ext 3 etc not being recognised.

Danson,
I would be very interested, as would Brian Masinick, to know how exactly you accomplished that. Did you pre-allocate and format the necessary BSD slices? If so, what program did you use?

On my “test” machine I have 3 or 4 distros installed, couple of free ext3-formatted partitions and a some unallocated space. When I tried to install either Dragonfly, Desktop or PC-BSD, none of them would recognize either the Linux partitions or the unallocated space. They saw the entire disk as available. Needless to say, even though it is my test PC, I did not want BSD to overwrite anything already there, so I did not proceed with the install.

I’ve used 1.6 quite a bit and have been very impressed. It’s solid and easy to use. Sad to see there’ll be no more after 1.7.

Not quite sure about the comments on multi-boot environments with Linux, though. Perhaps I’m not understanding the nature of the posts correctly, but I have Desktop BSD 1.6 installed on the same physical disk as OpenSuSE and it works with no problems (just got the partitioning ready before the BSD install and pointed the installer to the right place).

In any case, I’ll definitely have a look at 1.7 and head over to the forums to thank the developers.

Good point, Dragonmouth. I cannot install FreeBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, or any other BSD version or derivative unless I have a separate disk or a virtual instance. That has actually been the reason why I don’t run the BSDs more often. The other reason is that I find the BSDs kernel scheduler tends to be well tuned for server performance but it not optimized as Linux is for desktop use – which has been the case since the 2.6 Linux kernel – which has been a few years now.

I like the BSDs, and they are actually the UNIX flavor from which I came – not FreeBSD, but BSD 4.2, which formed the basis for ULTRIX, the original SunOS (before the AT&T UNIX System V R3 inspired Sun Solaris), and a few of the other variations I used in the now distant past.