PC-BSD

[Yaroslav Tarasenko]

Filip Wuytack пишет:
Hey all,

there seems to be another new BSD...for desktops :-)

http://www.pcbsd.org/

always nice to see that BSD world growing...it can only improve cross 
fertilisation between all BSD flavors

~ Filip
I think one of the biggest problems that such distros encounter is the 
way a user can update software X.

Fresh example: i've installed OpenOffice suite (base system is FreeBSD 
5.3) on some workstations in our office. Later users began to complain 
that their wordprocessor goes buggy - the 'oowriter' process can just 
freeze so i can't even 'kill -9' it with root privileges. Ok, i've got a 
bunch of new packages, among them new version of OpenOffice. Right now 
i'm reading newsgroups watching 'top' output on one of those 
workstations. There's a ruby instance on the first string eating around 
100% of cpu time. This is how portupgrade works - it started fixing 
pkgdb 4 hours ago. And the box it's running isn't that slow - 512 Mb RAM 
& Celeron IV processor.

Slow. Shamefully slow. And besides this, one should know all those 
portupgrade commandline options and the way he or she should react when 
pkgdb -F will ask what to do: remove perl 5.8 or 5.6, for example.

On a workstation with a lot of software, libraries, dependencies good 
update management is the first question. Not an installer, not even cute 
GUI.

I remember how it was simple installing software (and upgrading to new 
versions) on BeOS: you should just unzip archive file and put its 
contents somewhere on HD. Is it a dream in bsd world?