My OperaFreeSBIE 2.0.1
Friday, May 18, 2007 2:18:23 AM
I figure I should check out another FreeBSD-based OS other than DesktopBSD just for a point of comparison. FreeSBIE is a live-CD implementation of FreeBSD with an extended toolkit for creating your own implementation. That would be fun if you were a bit geekier than me, I'm sure...Command line?
Well, this review is going to be short... On startup I'm greeted with a splash screen which says "press any key to see boot messages". If I press any key I'm greeted with a command prompt. What do I do now???
Eventually I figure out that typing "start" and hitting return confirms "startx" (as in, the nice command line asks me if I really meant to type startx), which starts the graphical interface. Poor start for a desktop operating system that a simple command such as this isn't implemented by default.
I start into xfce, and it is rather pretty. Apparently fluxbox is also available on the CD. There's a taskbar at the top and a range of little icons and a 4-desktop pager on the bottom bar, it's set up as a kind-of upside-down Gnome. Lots of information about my system is being constantly updated in the top right-hand corner - uptime, CPU frequency and load, Memory usage, processes running and so on.
The range of applications built-in is adequate but not great. Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, xchat IRC, remote desktop client and so on - the range of internet applications is ok. There's only 4 multimedia apps for playing media not editing it. The Gimp and Inkscape make for nice graphics applications. Office-wise there's AbiWord and Gnumeric for spreadsheets and not much else. No games, and certainly nothing to use to configure wireless.
I discover that storage media - as in my Hard Disk - is not mounted by default. Hunting around the FreeSBIE site I found this user manual, which advises me I have to make use of the command line again in order to mount disks. "sudo mountdisks rw" does it. Again, how hard would it be to do this by default and put a shortcut to them somewhere convenient?
Obviously this Live CD is not meant for the beginner user.
Also, considering that the CD is apparently full, I'm wondering what took up all the space.
Antero Hytönenanzah # Friday, May 18, 2007 7:07:19 PM
Problem might be that FreeBSD hasn't been beginner friendly desktop operating system before PC-BSD and DesktopBSD came out and that's not very long time. FreeBSDs documentation is great, but most beginners don't like typing commands that much.
Jamesjamesfaction # Monday, May 21, 2007 4:37:16 AM
For those who like to tinker and find ways to get the size of the image down and cram more stuff in, they might like to play with FreeSBIE I guess.
blackbelt_jones # Tuesday, June 19, 2007 4:20:50 PM
Clearly this isn't aimed at the "beginner" who has just just arrived off the boat from Windows, or it would use KDE as it's Desktop. I think it may be aimed at the "beginner" like me, who is comfortable with Linux but has never tried BSD before.
From the documentation:
2.3 Mounting your disks
FreeSBIE can be used in many different situations but quite often it reveals its usefulness as a Rescue and Recovery tool: your machine boots from the FreeSBIE CD-ROM and you get a working system to recover the one installed on the hard disks of your machine. To accomplish this task you need to mount your hard disks. FreeSBIE can do this for you: the script /usr/local/sbin/mountdisks.sh can mount your FAT16/32, UFS2, EXT2FS, ReiserFS slices and partitions up to a number of 8 per filesystem type. To use it, run it as the user freesbie with the following command:
% sudo mountdisks.sh rw
If you want your slices/partitions to be mounted in read-only mode, replace rw with ro. Partitions and slices are mounted on subdirectories of the /mnt/ directory.
But the command isn't working, and neither is the command I would normally use to mount the hard drives from a Live Linux CD. Maybe I'll try Desktop BSD.