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.

GNU/Linux is the most popular operating system built with free/open source software. However, it is not the only one: FreeBSD is also becoming popular for its stability, robustness and security. In this article, I’ll take a look at their similarities and differences.

Getting FreeBSD to act as a wireless access point involves the following steps:

• Make sure your installation includes hostapd and named (BIND)
  
• Recompile your kernel for pf support
  
• pf is not the only way to do this, but I strongly prefer pf to the ipfw/ipfilter and have written the How-To to use it
  
• Configure NAT (and any firewall rules)
  
• Install isc-dhcp3-server
  
• Configure daemons and start them

PCBSD is a nice distribution for new users to the "alternative" operating systems as it is pointed towards new users, but advance users would not be disappointed. It is nice to see that PCBSD is progressing nicely, but there is still that issue of no 64 bit support as they have done it once in the past but strictly release their distribution for 32bit support only.

As some of you may know, Linux is not the only Unix-like operating system available. There are other UNIX derivatives, and one of the most popular among them is called BSD. If you have been to Distrowatch, you will see different BSD distributions listed in there.

The most exciting new feature in OpenBSD/sparc64 is SMP support. All supported systems should work, with the exception of the Enterprise 10000 (for which support was added after the 4.3 release was made). The release has still some stability issues on systems with more than 4 CPUs (most of these are already fixed in -current), but in general the sparc64 SMP kernel is remarkably stable. Snapshots have been built on a dual UltraSPARC-IIIi machine since November, less than half a year after Theo complained that his shiny new Sun Fire V215 only "half" worked.

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 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?