PCBSD 9.0 Review

I’ve been a big fan of FreeBSD. I got acquainted to it when I was reading a wiki article on Mac OS X. Then I came to know that it is based on something called FreeBSD. I started searching for it and I downloaded a release. I tried to install it on my system & was successful. But the problem was that it was a command line installation & there were no graphics after installation. That wasn’t a problem for me but the thing was that it required a fast internet connection to install a graphical environment such as GNOME or KDE. So, here I am giving another try to PC-BSD 9.0.

Installation

I downloaded the image from the internet, 64-bit to be precise. It was around 3.59 GB in size but most importantly it contained KDE, GNOME, Openbox, XBMC (which I can’t live without) and some more. I burned it to a DVD & started the installation. The first thing that you have to keep in mind is that it only installs on a primary partition. Secondly, there was an option for installing it on a ZFS filesystem but 4 GB RAM was recommended. That wasn’t a problem for me, so I selected the option. Interestingly, it did everything on its own when I assigned a primary 100 GB partition to it. All the swap, /usr etc were inside that partition. I selected KDE as a graphical desktop manager. I also selected the system source code & ports collection (more on that later).The installation started but it took very long time, about 40 minutes to install on my system (see the specifications in the my rig section).

The Desktop

After the long but very, very easy installation I logged in to my desktop. But before that it asked me to select the resolution of my monitor. It also auto-detected my graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 260) & installed the necessary drivers for it. Once I selected the correct resolution, it wrote the necessary configuration to the Xorg.conf file & voila, everything was butter smooth. KDE looked good. But the fonts weren’t upto my expectation but they were not bad either. I use the infinality package on Arch Linux so I expected a bit more. Here’s the screenshot of the desktop..

Installation of applications

PC-BSD has a pretty good way of installing the applications. It’s packages are in the format of .pbi which stand for PCBSD Installer. The PBI files can be double clicked and installed. That’s it. But, there’s a app store as well. It is called app-cafe. Here you can select the various applications that you want to install on your system. But some of them are pretty large in size. For eg. Mozilla Firefox 9.0 was around 80 MB & Chromium was whopping 100+. There’s another way to install the apps that is called ports. If you’ve build the packages on Gentoo Linux via portage then you’ll feel right at home. Ports collection contain hunderds of packages which you can navigate & install. They are located in /usr/ports. If you want to search for a package then issue whereis packagename. Compiling packages takes time. If you’re not comfortable with that but still want to install via ports then please issue pkg_add -r packagename in the terminal as a root user, it will install the required package. That’s it. I’m also posting a screenshot of AppCafe in action.

General Usage

PCBSD feels right at home if you’re familiar to GNU/Linux. You can’t tell if you’re running PCBSD or GNU/Linux. KDE is at version 4.7.3 which is pretty much the bleeding edge. But never did I manage a single crash or freeze. Moreover, I was watching HD clips along with compilation of packages & surfing the web at the same time & the system was doing very,very well. It automatically mounted my NTFS Windows partition but to mount the existing ext4 from Arch Linux, I had to fiddle around a bit. But there are some problems too. For e.g., Konqueror is the default & the only browser that ships with the OS Update:- There are other browsers such as Epiphany, Midori etc for GNOME & LXDE (Thanks to Ken Moore for pointing that out). Considering the size of the DVD, they should’ve included either Firefox or Chromium. Moreover, Konqueror uses KHTML as the rendering engine instead of WebKit which I found more usable than the former. Secondly, the office suite KOffice that ships with KDE doesn’t open ODF files. That is a huge, huge drawback for me. I love LibreOffice & save my files in ODF whenever possible. But it wouldn’t open them. Shockingly, it did open .docx files.

Verdict

PCBSD is very, very robust operating system built on the ultra-powerful but unknown-giant FreeBSD. I found it sufficient for my daily needs barring the office suite.

Pros :-

  • Very, very stable.
  • Uses very little resources (even when using KDE).
  • Very Secure.
  • Very easy installation.
  • NVIDIA Drivers bulit-in.

Cons :-

  • Poor office suite (KOffice) but you can install LibreOffce via the ports or AppCafe.
  • No browser other than Konqueror in the default KDE installation. (You can install Firefox, Opera or Chromium later).
  • Some sound cards not supported.
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Free Software

19/01/2012

8 Comments

Crunchbang Linux Review

It all started when a friend of mine wanted to install Linux on his IBM ThinkPad. But, as he was working in Reliance Communications, the laptop was company provided. But the USB ports on the laptop too were blocked that means there was no option of using a USB drive either. He had a Seagate External HDD at his disposal. So, I decided to install Crunchbang Linux on that spare drive. It was a success, but I was so impressed by the Crunchbang Linux distribution that I decided to install it on my own spare 100 GB partition.

Installation

The installation was very smooth. To install it, I downloaded the 64-bit image from http://www.crunchbang.com. The, I burned it to my re-writeable DVD. For some odd reason, I couldn’t make a bootable USB of it. You all must be familiar with the installation of Linux so I’m not going to cover it here. But after 10 minutes, I was on the desktop.

The Desktop

The desktop is neat & clean OpenBox implementation. I was surprised to see that it was using just 110 MB of RAM. Get a 32-bit distribution & it will use less RAM. Here’s the screenshot of the desktop.

See, the desktop is the cleanest implementation I’ve ever seen. The little widget that you see on the right side is called Conky. It displays the information regarding your system such as RAM usage, Disk Usage & swap usage. Right clicking on the desktop will display the OpenBox menu. Here’s the example :-

The applications that switch by default are :-

  • Iceweasel (Firefox without official branding)
  • Terminal
  • VLC Player
  • Abiword
  • gFTP
  • xChat
  • And some more

After the installation it gives you the option of installing other software. In case you skipped that option, open the terminal and issue cb-welcome. It will restart that script and will ask you to download Libreoffice, Java, development libraries & tools. Also, as the distribution is based on Debian, it is ultra-stable. Moreover, you can use the ususal sudo apt-get update to update & upgrade your system.

After the installation, I installed some more programs which I deem essential for my daily needs. They are :-

This distribution is perfect if you want to make it a host for VirtualBox. It uses only 150 MB RAM so it plays perfect with simultaneous distribution running together in a virtualized environment.

There are some drawbacks too. For e.g. it doesn’t automatically mount the internal drives (NTFS) after the installation. To mount those you have to edit your /etc/fstab file & add the mount points of Windows drives over there. Moreover, it is a 650 MB installation disk and there’s no email client & Office distribution. I think that they should include LibreOffice in the next release.

Pros :-

  • Ultra Light.
  • Very, very stable
  • Based on Debian
  • apt-get goodness
  • Perfect for low power systems.

Cons :-

  • No mail client.
  • No Office Suite.
  • Internal drives need to be mounted manually.

Rating :- 8/10

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Free Software, GNU/Linux

09/01/2012

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HP TouchPad Review

I know that it is very, very late. But still I somehow got my hands on a HP TouchPad last week. It is here with me for few weeks. So, here’s the review

To unlock the screen, you’ve to simply slide the lock icon to any part of the screen and it gets unlocked. Moreover, you can also set up a PIN or a password to securely lock your TouchPad.
Now, this is how the desktop looks like with a few cards (apps on TouchPad) open.

The icons on the bottom are, web browser, mail, music player, photos, Facebook & all apps. They can all be changed according to your needs. To change them, you simply have to drag them out of their place & replace them with the icons of your choice.

The UI

This is the UI. It is divided into Apps, Downloads, Favorites & Settings.

Apps Tab

Downloads Tab

Favorites Tab

Settings Tab

The Web Browser

The Web-Browser is Webkit based. It has full support for Adobe Flash. The embedded YouTube videos play right inside the browser. Here are some screenshots of the browser

Interestingly, it doesn’t clears the Acid 3 tests. And below is the screenshot depicting YouTube video playing right inside the browser.

The E-Mail client, Contacts & Calendar

The E-Mail client integrates it self with the accounts that you’ve entered in the TouchPad. There is support for GMail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo!, MS Exchange & even Facebook. Here’s the email account in action.

You can see that there is full support for HTML mail inside the browser. Attachments like images are displayed inline. For Office documents there is QuickOffice to handle them. It supports MS Office & ODF files.

Maps & Gallery

Maps is taken care by Bing Maps. Here’s the screenshots of the maps

Gallery

The gallery integrates with the Facebook account that you’ve entered. Also, the images which you download from the Internet are automatically displayed inside the gallery. here’s the screenshot of the gallery in action.

Verdict :-

Pros :-

  • Awesome hardware.
  • Plays games without lag.
  • Support for XviD, DivX, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, AAC formats.
  • Superb Multitasking.
  • Good OS.
  • Superb sound from the device.

Cons :-

  • Very, very few apps.
  • Screen is very reflective.
  • Lack of EPUB reader.
  • No SD-Card slot.
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Free Software

10/12/2011

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CentOS 6.0 Review

As you all know, I had installed CentOS 6 inside VirtualBox. I was initially thinking about installing it natively on my system, but then, the thought of reinstalling the OS & configuring the settings again came to my mind and I decided to go virtual. So, here’s the hardware on which I installed CentOS 6 (32-bit) :-

  • 2 virtual cores
  • 1024 MB RAM
  • 64 MB of VRAM
  • 10 GB VBOX HDD
  • Bridged network connection (so that I can manage it as a network computer)

Installation :-

I made an ISO of the DVD which I got from Linux for You. Although I had also downloaded a 64-bit image earlier, but I felt that 32-bit should suffice for the needs of the virtual machine. The installer greets you with the ultra-stable and famous Anaconda Installer from Red Hat & Fedora stables. This installer, as you know is very versatile. It asks you to check the install media. It is a good idea to do so. Once, the check is finished, it moves on to the patition management. Now, here it will provide you with a lot of options like RAID, LVM etc. If you want to setup a LVM (which I think you should if you’re doing a native one-OS-per-system install), then it will guide you through the entire process. RAID is essential for the system admins & servers. But, if you don’t want any of these options, then select ‘Basic Storage Devices’  and move on. Now, here you can carry out standard Linux partition management. 

Once, you’ve finished the partition & root-password, then it will ask you which packages to install. If you’ve a fast internet connection then you can download & install the packages later, if you haven’t got your hands on high bandwidth then click on ‘Customize now’  and start selecting your packages. These are the packages that I selected :-

  • GNOME 2.32
  • OpenOffice.Org (it doesn’t ships LIbreOffice for now)
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Development libraries
  • Development tools

It will automatically choose which packages you need for your hardware. Just hit install now & relax. It should install in 20-30 minutes.

 

The Desktop :-

The desktop of CentOS 6 depends on which desktop environment you selected. I’m a huge fan of GNOME desktop environment so I selected this. Here’s the screenshot of my desktop environment :-

Package management :-

The package management is taken care by YUM. It is the default package manager of Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS & Scientific Linux now. Yum is very, very powerful tool. It can perform almost any task that you can think from a package manager. Some of it’s commands are listed below :-

  • yum install package (to install package)
  • yum remove package (to remove package)
  • yum search package (to search)
  • yum update
  • package-cleanup –old-kernels (to remove old kernels)

Tip :-

Run yum install yum-presto after running your system for the first time in the terminal. It will install DeltaRPMs & Presto package that will reduce the update size by almost 90%. It is a very useful and handy tool for everybody. Conserve bandwidth people.

Additional repos for yum – You can try out some extra repositories for CentOS from here :- http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge

Verdict :-

CentOS 6.0 is highly recommended to anybody who is serious about the stability & security of his workstation. Although it is also good for home users, but I think that one should first have some experience with LInux before using CentOS. My rating :- 4.5/5.

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Free Software

29/09/2011

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One file to rule them all.

Last week I gave a try to CentOS 6.0. I installed it inside VirtualBox in Windows 7. I was simply amazed by its stability and very low memory usage. I think that ultra-stable & tested packages use much, much less memory as compared to the bleeding edge packages. So, the next task was to share the folders between CentOS & Windows. I knew I had to install SAMBA package for this. I installed the SAMBA packages but turns out, setting up SAMBA on CentOS is quite tough. The first and foremost headache about CentOS is the dreaded SELinux. This may be very, very useful to the enterprises etc. But I don’t see a single reason why it should be kept on it’s default (on) settings for the home user. Whenever I tried to do something regarding networking & other stuff, the dreaded SELinux would take over and wouldn’t let me do so. So, I had to disable it.

#
# /etc/rc.conf – Main Configuration for Arch Linux
#

# ———————————————————————–
# LOCALIZATION
# ———————————————————————–
#
# LOCALE: available languages can be listed with the ‘locale -a’ command
# DAEMON_LOCALE: If set to ‘yes’, use $LOCALE as the locale during daemon
# startup and during the boot process. If set to ‘no’, the C locale is used.
# HARDWARECLOCK: set to “UTC” or “localtime”, any other value will result
#   in the hardware clock being left untouched (useful for virtualization)
#   Note: Using “localtime” is discouraged.
# TIMEZONE: timezones are found in /usr/share/zoneinfo
# KEYMAP: keymaps are found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps
# CONSOLEFONT: found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts (only needed for non-US)
# CONSOLEMAP: found in /usr/share/kbd/consoletrans
# USECOLOR: use ANSI color sequences in startup messages
# VERBOSE: Verbose level (from 1 to 8). man 3 syslog for level info
#
LOCALE=”en_US.UTF-8″
DAEMON_LOCALE=”no”
HARDWARECLOCK=”localtime”
TIMEZONE=”Asia/Kolkata”
KEYMAP=”us”
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR=”yes”
VERBOSE=”3″

# ———————————————————————–
# HARDWARE
# ———————————————————————–
#
# MODULES: Modules to load at boot-up. Blacklisting is no longer supported.
#   Replace every !module by an entry as on the following line in a file in
#   /etc/modprobe.d:
#     blacklist module
#   See “man modprobe.conf” for details.
#

#MODULES=(vboxdrv vboxnetflt)
MODULES=(powernow-k8 cpufreq_ondemand cpufreq_powersave vboxdrv vboxnetflt )
# Udev settle timeout (default to 30)
UDEV_TIMEOUT=30

# Scan for FakeRAID (dmraid) Volumes at startup
USEDMRAID=”no”

# Scan for BTRFS volumes at startup
USEBTRFS=”no”

# Scan for LVM volume groups at startup, required if you use LVM
USELVM=”no”

# ———————————————————————–
# NETWORKING
# ———————————————————————–
#
# HOSTNAME: Hostname of machine. Should also be put in /etc/hosts
#
HOSTNAME=”AX-64″

# Use ‘ip addr’ or ‘ls /sys/class/net/’ to see all available interfaces.
#
# Wired network setup
#   – interface: name of device (required)
#   – address: IP address (leave blank for DHCP)
#   – netmask: subnet mask (ignored for DHCP)
#   – gateway: default route (ignored for DHCP)
#
# Static IP example
# interface=eth0
# address=192.168.0.2
# netmask=255.255.255.0
# gateway=192.168.0.1
#
# DHCP example
# interface=eth0
# address=
# netmask=
# gateway=

interface=eth0
address=192.168.1.2
netmask=255.255.255.0
gateway=192.168.1.1

# Setting this to “yes” will skip network shutdown.
# This is required if your root device is on NFS.
NETWORK_PERSIST=”no”

# Enable these netcfg profiles at boot-up. These are useful if you happen to
# need more advanced network features than the simple network service
# supports, such as multiple network configurations (ie, laptop users)
#   – set to ‘menu’ to present a menu during boot-up (dialog package required)
#   – prefix an entry with a ! to disable it
#
# Network profiles are found in /etc/network.d
#
# This requires the netcfg package
#
#NETWORKS=(main)

# ———————————————————————–
# DAEMONS
# ———————————————————————–
#
# Daemons to start at boot-up (in this order)
#   – prefix a daemon with a ! to disable it
#   – prefix a daemon with a @ to start it up in the background
#
# If something other takes care of your hardware clock (ntpd, dual-boot…)
# you should disable ‘hwclock’ here.
#
DAEMONS=(hwclock @acpid syslog-ng network netfs dkms_autoinstaller sshd @crond @alsa dbus hal gdm @cups @cpufreq @cpu)

Secondly, I’ve been using Arch Linux for a while now. I like it so much that it is my default operating system now. Windows 7 is for games & FreeBSD is for learning BSD. The cool thing about Arch Linux (besides the KISS principle) is /etc/rc.conf file. This is THE file which you can use to manage your system. Here’s the output of my rc.conf file.

As you guys can see, I can manage what ever I want to manage of my system. Be it networking, hostname, kernel modules, daemons etc. Whereas in System V based I had to edit various files regarding what I was configuring. This is where CentOS gets frustrating. That’s why rc.conf is often regarding as One file to rule them all.

Free Software, GNU/Linux

29/09/2011

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CentOS 6

Of lately, I’ve been trying out some ultra-stable versions of GNU/Linux. Earlier, I tried my hands on Debian 6. But, it had some binary blobs missing which rendered some of my hardware (network card) useless. Then, CentOS 6 came along with the Linux for You magazine. I’m trying it out in VirtualBox (too lazy to set it up natively). Will keep you guys updated when I’ll install it natively.

Free Software

16/09/2011

1 Comment

Changing Times

Take a trip back the memory lane. About 2-3 years ago, for all my HD needs, I would boot Windows and then watch hd content on a supported player. But then I got my nvidia card and installed Linux on my system. The superb VDPAU library enables the decoding via the gpu. Mplayer and xbmc are some of the awesome examples is this power. The CPU usage never crosses 5% when VDPAU is used. No other player on Windows comes close to this claim.

Free Software

27/03/2011

2 Comments

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