PC-BSD

System Setup

The PC-BSD initial setup was pleasant enough, there was only brief exposure to the horror of the console as cryptic text scrolled past. I can imagine consumers panicking when they see these sorts of screens, pages of text they can’t comprehend without a solid understanding that much of it really is meaningless unless the system doesn’t work, and then it rockets from being worthless to priceless. Generally when I think of designing operating systems for consumers, you want to suppress this behind some pretty pictures or a progress bar, which is a clearer representation that everything is proceeding according to plan. Even when everything is working properly in systems like these you can spy error reports in the startup console text screens. The developers either don’t care or expect the errors and they are “worthless” issues because the system starts up normally. To consumers, if they are reading along and have a little bit of training about what they are looking at, they could be unsettled by a line that looks like an error even if it’s a throwaway warning.

After the initial setup, the standard installation questions are rather straightforward. Language and locale settings, however it is good to note that these days the really good systems automatically fetch much of this material from the indigenous Internet address. I would argue that if the IP is in the United States then it’s likely English, and if you know the IP, then you know the location, so time zones are easily set as well. The hostname selection is always different from system to system I’ve found. Some systems are computer-before-person and some are person-before-computer. Since you can set this to whatever you like, it’s not really a quibble.

PC-BSD does a very good job at clearly separating the difference between root access and user access. You create the password for the root account, and then it automatically leads you to create a user account afterwards, with the option for encryption presented immediately, which is a nice touch.

First Login

I was presented with a login dialog box, I selected my window manager to be Cinnamon as it was an installer option when I set up this system. The system attempted to start X Windows and then the desktop manager crashed. I tried to restart it twice and then when that wasn’t working I clicked Cancel and the system started into X Windows without a desktop manager. There are no clear ways on the display to proceed forward unless I wish to use “AppCafe”, “PC-BSD Control Panel”, or the “PC-BSD Handbook”. I tried to use the magic keyboard combination of Control-Alt-Backspace to exit out of X Windows to no avail, the key combination does not work. I then inserted Control-Alt-Delete which reset the system and led me directly back to the login window. This time I selected the default window manager, of KDE and logged in. The system did at this point proceed properly.

I tried to start a basic application, in this case I wandered through the applications and selected “Marble” in the education category. The app failed silently. After that I went to system update and started the update search. The wait for progress was rather long at about five minutes, but I did see there were “Base System Updates” available, what they are is not stated, but I elected to install them anyways. The progress bar does not really fill up in the way that a consumer would expect, but rather as a quarter-inch blue rippled box that bounces slowly left and right.

Generally when the system is installed and updated it seems to be competent. The fact that you can’t really stray from the KDE interface is a little bit of a concern, but generally not a huge problem. I would say that PC-BSD really isn’t ready for prime time consumer use yet. Then again, no Linux OS is, at least yet.