If Linux Distributions Were Footballers..

This is just a bit of fun, blending my two great loves, Linux and football.
I make no apology for the English Premiership-centric choices.
Indeed, I'd welcome any other suggestions from around the globe...
Debian = Petr Cech, Chelsea
Anyone who knows anything about football knows that the great teams are built on the solid foundation of a great goalkeeper. Anyone who knows anything about Linux knows that many distributions are built on a great distribution. Still, prone to the occasional headache and likely to argue with its defenders.
Sabayon = Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United
Some dazzling footwork from the OS in the bright orange/blue/white/gold/red/yellow boots, though sometimes opts for a ligament-twisting, multiple step-over, reverse pass when a simple through-ball would suffice. Also prone to falling over in the box for no apparent reason.
Slackware = John Terry, Chelsea
Unyielding, old-fashioned defender, solid as a rock and liable to boot the ball (and opponents) into the stand rather than concede a yard.
Gentoo = Dimitar Berbatov, Manchester United
Complicated, moody but with the right man-management, prone to moments of exquisite brilliance. Unlikely to reach its potential because of inner turmoil and inability to focus on the glittering prize.
Mandriva = Karim Benzema, Lyon
Sophisticated, stylish, Gallic flair coupled with wonderful athleticism. After a couple of quiet years consolidating its reputation, is on the verge of mega-stardom and likely to attract a lot of attention throughout Europe.
Ubuntu = Robinho, Manchester City
Has en eye on world domination, thanks to huge influx of money from billionaire backer, but is actually not quite as good as it thinks it is. Large, loyal following who display a tendency to become snippy when criticised.
OpenSUSE = Michael Ballack, Chelsea
Germanic efficiency produces a system that seldom fails but, equally, seldom entertains in the manner for which, say, Sabayon, is renowned.
Knoppix = Michael Essien, Chelsea
The incredibly gifted, wonderfully useful utility player of the team, capable of fulfilling every role from defender, to workhorse midfielder or goalscorer. The type of OS that every manager loves to have on his bench, to call on in times of emergency.
Damn Small Linux = Joe Cole, Chelsea
The pocket-rocket midfielder. Small and agile, but well-equipped, with more tricks in its bag than you'd expect given its diminutive size. Often pops up in the penalty box to steal the glory from the big boys.
Linux Mint = Steven Gerrard, Liverpool
The real deal – polished performer with the drive and determination to be a winner. Not afraid to be creative and get forward when required but equally at home keeping things safe and secure at the back. The complete player.
Pardus = Andrei Arshavin, Zenit St Petersburg
One of those sneaky performers: You don't realise how good they are until 20 minutes are on the clock and you're already 3-0 down, with your star player looking ineffective and your previously-solid defence now leaking like a sieve.

First Impressions: Pardus 2008.1 KDE4 Edition

ALMOST a year has passed since I first reviewed Pardus, the Linux distribution developed by a team working from the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology.
The Pardus team have very lofty ambitions – indeed, their intention is to create an operating system which will be adopted widely throughout their nation.
Thankfully, the rest of us can get in on the Pardus act, too, as it increasingly supports extra languages.
As my previous review shows, I was mightily impressed with Pardus, so I was delighted to see a recent appearance in the Distrowatch release listings for the latest version, 2008.1.
What particularly caught my attention was the inclusion of a live CD version (the Pardus live CDs bear the nickname 'Calisan') sporting the KDE 4 desktop environment.
It is important to note at the outset that this is largely a proof-of-concept release, just to show how well KDE 4 is being integrated into the Pardus family.
What that means in usage terms is that certain things are missing from the live CD which appear in the installation disks available from the Pardus website.
No matter, this is still a very interesting release, as the official release notes indicate.
As I said, this KDE4 version lacks a number of features present in the full release so readers should not treat this as an in-depth, full review.
I used the live CD on two different machines: A desktop PC with an AMD Sempron 3600+ processor, 1.5GB of RAM, integrated ATI X1200 graphics and wired ethernet access to broadband; the second machine was my Dell Latitude X1 laptop, which has a 1.1GHz Intel Centrino processor, 512MB of RAM and Intel/PRO Wireless networking.
At boot time the user is offered the chance to choose his native language and screen resolution by hitting F2 and F3.
Pardus then loads the funkiest, fanciest most impressive boot sequence I have ever seen, featuring Pardus's stylish artwork and a sequence of screens showing the various possible uses of this OS – it is a dazzling introduction and a delightful surprise.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the desktop which sports a background image showing a reclining hyena.I do not place much importance on wallpaper but this is, without doubt, one of the ugliest I have seen in a long time – even if it is an image of an endangered creature!
Even though I had selected American English (UK English is not available as a boot option), the impressive, revamped Network Manager was only available in Turkish.
No matter, setting up a network through this utility is a fairly intuitive exercise and in both cases I was able to get my broadband connection running with just a couple of clicks.My soundcards in both cases were automatically configured.
I am warming to the KDE 4 environment the more I use it.
I like my file managers simple but flexible (think PcmanFM, Thunar) and Dolphin fits the bill nicely, and I am even getting used to the side-scrolling KDE start menu (I said 'getting used to', not 'getting to like'!).
I guess that one day I might even get to like all those Plasmoid desktop gimmicks people seem so keen on, but I am not quite there yet.
My attached drives and USB sticks were all automatically detected and mounted in the KDE 4 panel utility (there's a one-click 'eject' function here too).
I was able to play MP3s in Amarok, view a commercial DVD using the minimalist but still excellent Dragon player, watch an .AVI movie (The Eye) in Dragon Player, watch YouTube videos and Apple Movie Trailers in Firefox.System speed is surprisingly good for a live CD, even on the low powered Latitude X1.
The more you dig around in the menus, however, you realise how much has been left out of this proof-of-concept live CD: There is no installer and the Office menu lacks any entries for a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation applications.
Still, as a proof-of-concept exercise this is hugely successful.
I experienced no bugs and no instability on either machine, which bodes very well for the full installation version of Pardus/KDE 4.
There is a distinctly professional feel to Pardus 2008.1 which is enhanced by that dazzling introductory video and is continued through to the desktop.

Arch Of The Penguins

THERE are those Linux distributions which will install in a coffee break, with little intervention required from the user.
And there are those which demand plentiful reading beforehand, a thorough knowledge of one's hardware and a calm, clear mind.
Arch Linux 2008 falls into the latter category – and I love it.
I have been using Linux for more than a decade now but have only recently got around to trying Arch.
Arch is “a lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple”, according to the website, but new Linux users take note: “Simple” is not the same as “Easy”.
Here's an extract from the Arch team's own introduction to their distribution (read the full account here):

Arch Linux is a general purpose Linux distribution that can be moulded to do just about anything.
It is fast, lightweight, flexible, and most of the parts under the hood are quite simple to understand and tweak, which can make it a good distro to “learn the ropes” on.
We do not provide any configuration helper utilities (ie, you won't find linuxconf in here) so you will quickly become very proficient at configuring your system from the shell commandline.(Red Devil's emphasis)
Arch Linux uses i686-optimised packages which gives us improved performance over some of our i386-optimised cousins.
This means that Arch Linux will only run on a Pentium II processor or higher.
We try to stay fairly bleeding edge, and typically have the latest stable versions of software.

You will find the Arch download page here, and once you have burned the ISO file to a CD, your first port of call ought to be the superb beginner's guide and the installation guide.
In fact, I strongly recommend printing off the beginner's guide as a reference tool for use during your installation.
It is perfectly possible to install Arch simply by following the guide to the letter – I know, because this is exactly what I have done.
I ought to explain here that I do not plan to walk you through my installation.
The very nature of Arch means that it lets you, the user, take complete control of and responsibility for your computer.
There is little point, therefore, in me talking you through every step I took to install Arch on my PC because your machine and requirements will no doubt differ from mine.
Just follow the guide and be patient – you will get there eventually.
If you stumble along the way, the Arch user forum is a very friendly, well-populated resource for quick answers – I had a GRUB menu.lst issue which was resolved in a matter of minutes (thanks again dav7!).
Unlike most modern Linux distributions, Arch does not have a graphical installer – it is a text-driven, commandline operation – and further, it does not come with either the X window system or a desktop environment.
Some might see this as minimalism taken to extremes; I see it as a strength.
You want KDE? Install KDE4.1, like I did.Prefer something lighter – Xfce, Fluxbox, LXDE – fine, off you go and get them.
Dedicated GNOME user? No problem, it is there in the repository.
This is custom-built, roll-your-own Linux, so if you only need a small number of applications, you only install a small number – leave the clutter for the fans of the mega-distros, who probably never use more than a small fraction of the programs hogging their menus and hard drives.
If your machine lacks oomph, install a lightweight, fast desktop environment; if your machine is a powerhouse, fill your boots with KDE 4.1, Compiz, the works.
During your install you will be offered a series of Arch repositories from which Pacman, Arch's outstanding (commandline) package manager, will grab your applications.
These break down into:

Core: The principle behind Core is to offer one of each necessary tool for a base system

Extra: Anything not needed for the base system, but which makes Arch more usable – X, KDE, GNOME, for example

Unstable: Contains experimental and unstable software. It is perfectly safe to enable the unstable repository as there are no conflicts with the Core, Community or Extra packages and Pacman will warn you in advance of any potential problems

Testing: Contains candidates for Core, Unstable and Extra repositories

Community: Is maintained by Trusted Users (Tus) and is part of the Arch user repository (AUR). Contains binary packages from the AUR which have received enough user votes.

But it does not stop there, oh no.
Like Gentoo, Arch is well geared toward compiling software from source code, via its Arch Build System.
ABS is a 'ports-like' system for building software from source and packaging it into an installable .pkg.tar.gz package, which ios then installed by Pacman.
Here is how ABS works.
Firstly, you install abs with Pacman, thus:

pacman -Sy abs

Running 'abs' as root creates the ABS tree by synchronizing with the Arch Linux server.
If you wanted to build a package from source you would copy the build files (usually residing under /var/abs/
/) to a build directory (you create the build directory wherever suits you), navigate to that directory and do makepkg.
According to instructions in the PKGBUILD, makepkg will download the appropriate source tarball, unpack it, patch it if desired, compile according to CFLAGS specified in makepkg.conf, and finally compress the built files into a package with the extension .pkg.tar.gz.
PKGBUILDs may be customised to suit your configuration needs, or for applying patches.
Installing your software is then as easy as doing:

pacman -U <.pkg.tar.gz file>

There are very good guides on both the AUR and ABS here, here and here.
The benefits of compiling software from source are manifold.
Here is what the Arch team says are the benefits of using ABS:

The Arch Build System (ABS for short) is used to:
Recompile a package
Make and install new packages from source, of software for which no packages are yet available
Customise existing packages to fit your needs (enabling or disabling options, patching)
Rebuild your entire system using your compiler flags, "a la FreeBSD"
Cleanly build and install your own custom kernel.
Get kernel modules working with your custom kernel.
Easily compile and install a newer, older, beta, or development version of an Arch package by editing the version number in the PKGBUILD

Clearly, none of this is territory where new Linux users will feel comfortable, and I will stress now, in case it is not already evident, that Arch Linux is designed for intermediate/expert Linux users.
If you are prepared to spend a little time at the outset carefully and thoughtfully installing and configuring your Arch system, you will have an operating system that runs quickly, efficiently and which is extremely stable while running the very latest Open Source software.
Due to the rolling-release nature of Arch, your system is kept up to date with the very latest packages and patches, which can be achieved system-wide through a simple Pacman command, thus:

pacman -Syu

which will update and upgrade all the packages on your system in one fell swoop.
Personally, I tend to shy away from such broad-ranging upgrades – through long and bitter experience, I am of the 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' school of thought.
These are still very early days in my relationship with Arch but already I feel right at home with this distribution sitting on my main production machine.
There is still much to do and learn, but so far I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of tailoring Arch to fit my (humble) needs.

FOOTNOTE: There is a very good review of Arch Linux 2008.6 'Overlord' on Celettu's weblog here

The Generation Gorge

I WALK my eight-year-old twins (a boy and a girl) to school every morning, now that their mother works from the wee small hours until midday.
In recent weeks I have tried to encourage them to talk about all kinds of subjects, as well as those they cover in their classes, and to begin trying to treat them as inquisitive young adults-in-waiting.
No subject is taboo and I have promised them that, whatever they ask, I will try to answer their questions as truthfully as possible in the short time available to us.
Just the other day my son, who loves science and dinosaurs, asked how I thought the Earth and everything on it was created (bear in mind my kids go to a Roman Catholic primary school - their mother is of that faith).
I explained the two main schools of thought - creationism and evolution - and encouraged him to listen to both 'cases' and decide for himself as he got older.
He's a smart kid and he pressed me for my stance on the issue, so I told him I did not believe in a god and that I found science and evolutionary biology to have the more logical explanations for life, the universe and everything.
That seemed to temporarily satisfy him - I get the feeling we will re-visit this subject on many more occasions.
Then, during this morning's short walk, my daughter asked me a question about whether there was ice on Mars.
Not being too well versed in Martian lore, I gave it my best shot (I believed there was evidence that ice once existed on Mars, but there is none at present??) and promised to find a more definitive answer for her by the time she came home.
To this, she replied: "Daddy, you're like Google with legs!"
And that's how I know the term 'generation gap' is no longer adequate.

Frugalware 0.9 'Solaria': The Sweetie Shop Spoiled

CHOICE is good. Choice is healthy.
But too much choice can be overwhelming – just ask the child standing in front of a sweetshop counter full of treats.
Frugalware's latest distribution, codenamed 'Solaria' is like a Linux sweetshop and, like that small boy who does not know what to spend his pennies on, it left me feeling overwhelmed.
Actually, it also left me feeling slightly underwhelmed, too, if it is possible to feel both ways simultaneously.
The last time I reviewed Frugalware it was in its 0.4 'Wanda' period and I was very impressed by it.
But this latest version left me feeling unsatisfied: It is like choosing the brightest, most tempting sweet then finding it tastes bland.
Anyway, enough with the analogies.. to the detail. Here are the main release notes from this Hungary-based distribution:

* Up to date base system: Linux kernel 2.6.26, Glibc 2.8 and GCC 4.3.1
* Updated desktop packages: GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 and Firefox 3.0.1
* Setup: Improved support for machines with multiple network cards, the usb installer is now easier to start, fixed/documented installation in virtualbox/vmware.
* Improved graphical tools: FUN (update notifier) now supports news notifications.
* 6400 changes, including 568 new packages, 2279 updated packages and 926 closed tasks.

Solaria is a 4GB-plus DVD download, so you had better be sure you want to try it.
The reason it is such a hefty download is that Solaria crams in more desktop environments and window managers than you can shake a stick at.
You get: Blackbox; GNOME; GNOME with Openbox; KDE; KDE with Openbox; MWM; metacity; Openbox; TWM and XFCE4.
Does it not seem strange that a distribution bearing the word “frugal” [frugal: economical, thrifty, avoiding waste] in its title should offer so many options?
When you boot into Solaria you are greeted by a lovely pastel yellow boot option screen (I do not know why but it made me think of 'I Dream Of Jeannie'!), the theme of which is continued as the system loads.Which makes it all the more odd that once you load any of the various desktop environments, things take a decidedly nasty, bland turn.
Take a look at the two screenshots below – the first is from Frugalware 0.4, the second from 0.9.See what I mean?
The background wallpaper is a very minor issue but you have to wonder why the Frugalware team went from the distinctive look of Wanda to the drab look of Solaria.
But the look of Solaria is a minor irritation when you compare it with the menu structure.
Of the various desktop environments, the defaul KDE desktop is the calmest place to be.
The rest? A horrid mess.
Take a look at the screenshot below of the GNOME 'Others' submenu, and tell me that is not confusing and badly implemented – and all you can see are the entries from 'A' to 'I', there are dozens more after those.Still in GNOME, there are seven icons placed on the desktop: Computer, Steve's Home, Network Servers, System, Trash, Trash (again) and Home.Two of these – Home and System – do nothing, and who needs two Trash folders?
Further, the Preferences menu contains a lot of entries you would normally find in the GNOME Administration men, such as Network, Printers, Hardware and Wireless.
Things do not get much better when you load the Xfce desktop where, given that this is a lightweight environment, the menus are still jammed full of options and the desktop has the same pointless icon duplication.
Of all the DEs/WMs available in Solaria, only KDE appears to have had any care and attention lavished on it, but even the KDE 3.5.9 desktop hardly sets the heather alight in terms of its appearance.
This poor desktop organisation is very odd in a distribution which is, at heart, still very good indeed.
Frugalware is reasonably straightforward to install – maybe not the most newbie-friendly install out there, but not too taxing so long as you pay attention.
Its hardware recognition is reasonably good – most of my bits and bobs where detected and configured during the install (on a P4, 3.4GHz with 1024MB of RAM, wired ethernet broadband, Acer AL1912 19inch LCD, 80GB hard drive partition).
I had opted not to install the Frugalware bootloader because I prefer to edit the Linux Mint GRUB boot menu.lst file on my main partition to handle my test partition too.
As I mentioned earlier, Solaria is a massive download because so many packages are included: It is hard to imagine there is something major missing that you might desperately need.
Frugalware uses the Pacman package system which, when combined with a nice graphical package manager, Gfpm, is a complete, comprehensive and reliable way of managing your system.In terms of multimedia performance, I had a mixed experience.
Solaria comes with the key multimedia codecs – libdvdcss, win32, gst good, bad and ugly – preinstalled, which saves a lot of initial messing around.
However, whenever I tried to play movie trailers via Firefox on the Apple website, the browser crashed, and YouTube videos played but with no sound.
Thinking about it, by this stage I had not heard a peep out of Solaria – I had to rerun alsaconf to get my onboard Realtek sound going.
There is one further irritation I had to deal with. For some reason Solaria's installation sets your desktop dpi to a 'default' setting which is actually 72dpi, and not the usual, more usable 96dpi – since when has 72dpi been a 'default' setting?
In terms of system stability, I have no major issues to report, certainly in terms of the KDE desktop.
I did have some weird login problems with the Xfce desktop when, on my first boot into it, I got an error message telling me:

“Could not look up the internet address for Frugalware. This will prevent Xfce from operating correctly. It may be possible to correct this problem by adding Frugalware to the /etc/hosts on your system.”

Odd one that, never had that happen to me before – I just continued on through and everything seemed to work.
Frugalware is the only Linux distribution I know of which requires you to enter the root password before it will power down your PC – and I have no idea why it does that.
To conclude, there is actually a very solid, well-equipped distribution at the heart of Frugalware 0.9, but after some very disappointing first impressions it requires far too much system housekeeping to make it a distribution I can recommend.
The bland looks, the messy, overwhelming menus and a general feeling that Solaria was rushed out made this quite a major disappointment, especially after my experiences with Wanda way back.

Home page: http://frugalware.org/

User forums: http://forums.frugalware.org/

Download Solaria: http://frugalware.org/download

PC-BSD: Another Alternative To Linux As A Windows Alternative

IT has been a while since I used one of the BSD family of computer operating systems (read my review of DesktopBSD here) so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the latest version of PC-BSD, v 1.5.1.
But before I describe my experiences with this OS, a brief history lesson.
PC-BSD was founded by Kris Moore in 2005.
It began as an independent project but since October 2006 PC-BSD has been financially backed and supported by the enterprise-class hardware solution provider iXsystems.
PC-BSD is a desktop-oriented operating system just like Microsoft Windows XP, Apple Mac OS X and the many Linux distributions available today.
While PC-BSD is based on the much more server-oriented, Unix-like FreeBSD, Kris's OS is targeted at the ordinary desktop user.
This is a crucial point I will return to in my review, because ease-of-use is, to my mind, one of the areas where Linux – the other contender for the Windows crown – often falls down.
Obviously, if you are about to try a new PC operating system then ease-of-use begins with the installation process and PC-BSD scores very highly in this area.
Firstly, it uses a graphical installer, unlike FreeBSD which is a text-based process.
If you have ever installed a Windows system, or used Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE, then PC-BSD will present few problems.
It is a lovely installer with clear, concise instructions, straightforward options and just the right mix between hand-holding and freedom.In the past two weeks I have done three PC-BSD installs: One in a VirtualBox virtual machine, one on a Compaq Presario desktop machine with a 700MHz AMD Duron processor and 512MB of RAM, and the final install on my Fujitsu Siemens 3.4GHz Pentium 4 machine with 1024MB of RAM.
Each install has gone very smoothly, save for one small issue I noticed when it came to the bootloader installation.
In each of the first two cases I was devoting the whole disk to PC-BSD so I happily accepted the default partitioning options and installed the bootloader to the Master Boot Record (MBR).
But on the Pentium 4 machine I was installing PC-BSD as a dual boot alongside Linux Mint, and did not want to over-write Mint's GRUB boot menu.
I noticed that PC-BSD does not give any option other than to install its bootloader in the MBR, where my Mint GRUB resides, so I chose not to install the PC-BSD bootloader at all.
This lack of options for the bootloader install – for example, offering to install in the root partition - seems odd.
No matter, I quickly edited my existing GRUB menu.lst file in Mint to chainload-boot the PC-BSD partition (partitions are called 'slices' in the BSD world, by the way).
If you wish to learn more about installing PC-BSD there is an excellent guide here which contains really useful screenshots.
Once your installation is done, you have a series of first-boot configuration tasks to attend to, each of which come with simple graphical guidance.
Firstly, you must configure the X server to work with your monitor.Once that is done you find yourself at your default KDE 3.5.8 desktop, which has a polished, professional feel with just a small amount of PC-BSD branding.The next major task is to make sure your network adaptors have been properly detected and to configure them for your internet access – again, there is an excellent guide here.
I have had a mixed experience with my three PC-BSD installs when it comes to networking.
In my first install, in VirtualBox, I was unable to get the ethernet connection working even though my virtual machine was set up to use bridged networking (something that usually works flawlessly with Linux virtual machines).
When I installed PC-BSD onto my old Compaq Presario, which does not have an ethernet adaptor – I have to use USB wi-fi dongles with it – neither my Sitecom (zd1211 chipset) nor my Belkin (Ralink chipset) were detected.
On the hard-wired Fujitsu Siemens machine I had no problems at all – my network connection was detected and configured automatically during the installation.
I should point out that PC-BSD is, like most of the FreeBSD-based OSes, a very well documented system – there are links on the default desktop to a quick guide and the PC-BSD website, from where you are just a short hop away from the excellent documentation I mentioned earlier.
Also sitting on the desktop when you first login is an icon entitled 'Download PBIs', and it is in this particular area that I feel PC-BSD scores serious points.
What is one of the most comment complaints you hear about Linux distributions?
Right, there are too many different ways to install software – commandline, downloaded packages, graphical utlities like Synaptic, .debs, .rpms, apt-get, dpkg -i etc etc ... it can be bewildering.
It is no wonder that someone coming from Windows to Linux feels overwhelmed and confused.
Well, PC-BSD addresses this problem in a very interesting way.
Traditionally, BSD systems use a ports collection of software (read more about ports here) but PC-BSD goes a step further with its own .PBI system.
.PBI stands for PC-BSD Installer (or Push-Button Installer) and it works like a dream.
Now, Windows users – this will all sound familiar.
When you double-click on that desktop link I mentioned earlier you are taken to a website which hosts the PC-BSD software collection, which is nicely categorised for you so there is no need to search through lists of arcane-sounding applications.
All you need to do is click on the download link for the program you want, it downloads to your desktop, you double click on the application icon and it installs.
Really, it is that simple.
You also get the option to have desktop and menu icons installed for you.
I used the .PBI method to install Firefox on my fresh PC-BSD system:I mentioned earlier that the default desktop in PC-BSD 1.5.1 is KDE 3.5.8, and with it you get a whole host of the usual K-designated applications.
But GNOME lovers need not despair because their favourite desktop environment is available to download from the .PBI directory.
If you are also a lover of desktop eye candy you will be pleased to know that Compiz is installed by default.
It was when I was browsing through the .PBI directory that I twigged there may be problems ahead in getting PC-BSD to handle multimedia files.
I noticed there was an option to download Firefox with Wine and Flash, all in one package.
Hmm, that didn't sound too promising – why would you need Wine just to view Flash content on a website?
Well, PC-BSD adheres to strict codec laws (see this post) and the bottom line on playing any kind of multimedia that requires proprietary codecs is that it is, in my humble opinion, a right, royal PITA.
I scoured the PC-BSD documentation, forums and PBI directory for the necessary multimedia codecs – there appears to be a .PBI available called AllCodecs - but I kept getting 'File not found' messages and blank web pages.
As for watching Flash-based YouTube video sans Wine, well, the very best of luck – and could you let me know if you are successful?
So, my experience so far has been mixed, to say the least – a great installer, good configuration tools, mixed networking success, fabulous software installation, lousy multimedia support.. oh, and did I mention USB memory sticks?
I thought the days when I had to manually mount and unmount USB flash drives were long behind me but, no – that's what I have been doing for the last few days in PC-BSD.
Yes, automounting/opening USB memory sticks, like you do in nearly every single Linux and Microsoft OS, does not appear to work in PC-BSD.
Actually, even mounting and unmounting them manually doesn't appear to work very well either, judging from the number of cries for help on the PC-BSD forum.
Here's the route I took: To discover the identity my stick (formatted as FAT32) was being given by PC-BSD I ran, as root, a 'dmesg' command in Konsole and found the stick to be 'da5'.
Then, I tried the command:

mount -t msdosfs /dev/da5 /mnt

intending to mount the stick in the /mnt folder, as per a suggestion on the forum, but this failed, as did pretty much every other suggestion I could find.
This kind of manual intervention is, in my view, unacceptable in a modern operating system.
I readily admit my experience of BSD systems is very limited, so maybe I am missing an obvious trick and a more experienced PC-BSD user can point me in the correct direction?
I genuinely mean this, as overall I really like PC-BSD and I am eager to learn more about it.
The whole project, from the installed OS to the website to the documentation and the user forum, smacks of real quality, care and professionalism.
I'm very worried, however about those two main issues I raised: Multimedia and USB memory support.
If PC-BSD is to be a serious contender alongside the Ubuntus, Fedoras, Mandrivas and OpenSUSEs of the computing world, there is still some work to be done on that proclaimed 'ease-of-use' issue.

You can download the latest version of PC-BSD here.

The PC-BSD community forum can be found here.

Documentation is one of PC-BSD's strong points. There is a useful beginner's guide here.

Top Of The Class

THIS article in Free Software Magazine really put a smile on my face.
Firstly, I used to live in North Lincolnshire, so it is lovely to see a school from just down the coast from my old stamping ground (Skegness - town motto "It's So Bracing!") making the news for all the right reasons.
And secondly, I strongly support this move toward Open Source solutions for education in the UK.
It is something of a hot potato, which is quite understandable as there are large amounts of money involved.
Just look at the amount Garry Saddington's school was quoted for a new proprietary software-based ICT solution - £100,000!
But by using his initiative and seeking out Open Source/GNU Linux alternatives, Garry managed to replace the school's outdated PC network for a fraction of that cost.
I must congratulate the school's management team, too, for having the vision to see that Garry's Open Source solution made perfect sense, and the courage to agree to him implementing it.
To me, however, the most important element of this whole story is the young people who will be using the computers.
Do you think they care which operating system the school is using?
I very much doubt it.
And I also doubt that the fact it is Linux-based will have any impact whatsoever on the quality of their work.
Nor will it limit them later on when they enter a working world which is still largely reliant on proprietary software.
The important thing is that - because of Garry's initiative and his school's common sense - these kids will be computer-literate, and computer-literate kids are afraid of nothing!
I know - I have two eight-year-olds who already know more about using a computer (and they work on both Microsoft Windows AND Linux PCs) than my dear old dad ever knew in all his 60-odd years.
Well done Garry Saddington and well done Skegness Grammar school.