Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 12, 2006 02:24 AM
Hello folks,
It's good to see that some folks are making it a bit easier for newbies to use the BSD's, in this case, FreeBSD. The more Free Software users we have out here, the better.
This project reminds me of what the VectorLinux project does with Slackware (my favorite distro, personally). Like FreeBSD, on which Slackware is much patterned, Slackware has two reputations: one deserved, the other, in my opinion, not as deserved. The first is its solidity. Totally spot-on. The other is that of being "as user-friendly as a coiled rattlesnake." While I do question that assertion, VectorLinux does make a very slick Slackware tweak, which I like a lot.
However, I wrote an article on FreeBSD for the desktop a while back, using FreeBSD 5.1 as my guinea pig. I found that, while the installation does take a little geekiness, it's nothing that your average tech-savvy teenager couldn't figure out in pretty short order. Typical adult users, though, being a bit less "tinker-minded" than teenagers are, admittedly might be put off a bit. Once installed with KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org, FreeBSD reminded me so much of GNU/Linux that I had to do a uname to be sure which one I was using. Actually using the system was a breeze that even my mother found easy...after it was installed, of course.
I think that this might be the major stumbling block for newbies: installation. FreeBSD could improve a bit that way. Ubuntu Dapper Drake, Red Hat/Fedora, and SuSE have spoiled us totally, in a good way; it's actually easier to install Red Hat/Fedora than Windows XP and has been since Red Hat 6.2! I hope that DesktopBSD is focusing some on this issue as well, because FreeBSD is, of course, quite good.
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Any Free Software effort like this is welcome
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 12, 2006 02:24 AMIt's good to see that some folks are making it a bit easier for newbies to use the BSD's, in this case, FreeBSD. The more Free Software users we have out here, the better.
This project reminds me of what the VectorLinux project does with Slackware (my favorite distro, personally). Like FreeBSD, on which Slackware is much patterned, Slackware has two reputations: one deserved, the other, in my opinion, not as deserved. The first is its solidity. Totally spot-on. The other is that of being "as user-friendly as a coiled rattlesnake." While I do question that assertion, VectorLinux does make a very slick Slackware tweak, which I like a lot.
However, I wrote an article on FreeBSD for the desktop a while back, using FreeBSD 5.1 as my guinea pig. I found that, while the installation does take a little geekiness, it's nothing that your average tech-savvy teenager couldn't figure out in pretty short order. Typical adult users, though, being a bit less "tinker-minded" than teenagers are, admittedly might be put off a bit. Once installed with KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org, FreeBSD reminded me so much of GNU/Linux that I had to do a uname to be sure which one I was using. Actually using the system was a breeze that even my mother found easy...after it was installed, of course.
I think that this might be the major stumbling block for newbies: installation. FreeBSD could improve a bit that way. Ubuntu Dapper Drake, Red Hat/Fedora, and SuSE have spoiled us totally, in a good way; it's actually easier to install Red Hat/Fedora than Windows XP and has been since Red Hat 6.2! I hope that DesktopBSD is focusing some on this issue as well, because FreeBSD is, of course, quite good.
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