PC-BSD, on the other hand, "has been designed with the casual computer user in mind. Installing the system is simply a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes for the installation process to finish. Hardware such as video, sound, network, and other devices will be auto-detected and available at the first system startup. Home users will immediately feel comfortable with PC-BSD's desktop interface, with KDE 3.5 running under the hood.

PC-BSD is perhaps the best thing to come to the desktop BSD world in a very long time. But unfortunately, it looks as if this fantastic distribution is following the rest of the pack and will be trying to locate funds by competing with Linux for business customers. Why should this matter?

We installed the current beta release of PC-BSD, version 0.5a, and were immediately impressed. The installation CD is essentially a live CD that boots into a Fluxbox desktop and uses a simple, Anaconda-like graphical installer. It allows you to select your preferred partition for installing PC-BSD, configure the root password and users, set up the boot loader, and install the system.

PC-BSD introduces a new type of installtion file with .pbi extension (Push Button Installer or PC BSD Installer). These are self-contained installers that has all the dependent packages included in them. This mimics the behavior of the setup.exe or the DMG files in Win XP and Mac OS X respectively. Double clicking on this file in KDE will launch a graphical installation wizard (root password is required) and guide you through the installation of the software.

PC-BSD aims to be an easy to use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. As many Linux users, I have little or no knowledge about FreeBSD. I heard many rumors about it. I read about it and about its history. I even tried it a little while ago and, although I appreciated some aspects of it, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't ready for the desktop. So when I read the announcement of PC-BSD being released, I decided to have a look at it.

One of the reasons that made me exited about PC-BSD is that Compiz-Fusion is enabled by default and beside that Superkaramba is also installed by default. Now Ive been fooling around with Compiz and Beryl for quite some time and it was always a pain (pretty confusing) to properly set it up. Not anymore! The first time you fire up Compiz-Fusion, PC-BSD asks you whether you want to start it by default after bootstrap.

There are five different flavours of BSDs available today:
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly BSD and the new, easy-to-use PC-BSD. It is the last mentioned one - PC-BSD that is designed for common desktop use. Do have a look at the PC-BSD site to accquaint yourself with this wonderful BSD flavour.

In this article, I will cover the installation and configuration of PC-BSD for common desktop use. This guide is meant for the home user with a desire to learn about PC-BSD, therefore I have tried to keep things relatively simple.

The PC-BSD team have made it possible to upgrade the OS to the most recent version - 1.3.4 by downloading and installing a couple of patch files. Thus I had to download and install just over 40 MB of patch files which are made available in PBI format, to upgrade PC-BSD from ver 1.3.0 to 1.3.4. As a matter of fact, you do not even have to download individual files yourself to upgrade the OS.

PC-BSD should make an interesting change for two main reasons. Firstly, it uses a BSD kernel, as opposed to the Linux kernel used in distributions such as Debian and Slackware. Secondly, its main method of installing new programs seems to be closer to that of Windows than apt. So, let's see if its claims of user friendliness are accurate.