The PC-BSD project brings a user-friendly pre-configured KDE desktop to the FreeBSD community. Which is all well and good, but what if you're more of a GNOME person? Well, it turns out there is a project in the works for you too. The GhostBSD project is in its early stages, but it's paving the way for users who enjoy running GNOME on a FreeBSD base without any configuring or installing extra software

The hardware we are using for benchmarking this time was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 2GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor powering a 1680 x 1050 LVDS panel.

One of the first and most noticeable changes in version 1.6 is that it now contains a LiveCD option. While I wouldn't consider this to be a typical livecd, it certainly stacks up well against the large collection of other livecd's out there. Initially you're greeted with the standard Freebsd boot screen and bootup sequence. The first part of the livecd session starts out with a semi-graphical welcome screen that is keyboard driven.

The ZFS file system is included in FreeBSD 8.0 and from previous experience I've found it to work very well. However, my little server didn't really have the resources to properly experiment with it. For systems with enough RAM and disk to justify its use, I highly recommend taking a look at FreeBSD's ZFS implementation - for the snapshots feature, if nothing else. Being able to restore files without reaching for separate backup media can be a wonderful time saver.

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.

In the case of BSD and OpenSolaris, they're already in production deployments all around the world, so there's little to argue with there. HaikuOS, ReactOS, Darwin, and Singularity are entirely another story: they range from being minimally useful on the desktop to only useful as programming research projects.

Many computer systems around the world have been possessed by penguins; some have even been possessed by dead rats. In light of this, it is desireable to exorcize these evil spirits, and replace them with a nice, friendly daemon.

I've put together some code for building a FreeBSD disk image which will boot into memory, configure the network, set a root password, and enable SSH. This can be used to "depenguinate" a Linux box, without requiring any access beyond a network connection.