Dru Lavigne's 'The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD' is helping me update my packages and ports
The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it.
However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.
Yep, her PC-BSD book is helping me with FreeBSD — which isn't so unusual since PC-BSD 8.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.0.
Yesterday I fixed my problem with pkg_add, which was pulling packages from 7-stable instead of 7.3-release. I'll write that up soon.
My short review of Dru's PC-BSD book is that it's a must for the novice PC-BSD user and has more than enough tips for the advanced BSD user who wants to run PC-BSD or even FreeBSD. It's a great companion for her "Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, which I also highly recommend.
I'm still in the middle of my csup, so I'll report on how it turns out. And while I'm sure I have a GhostBSD (FreeBSD live with GNOME) disc somewhere, I'm about to burn a new one and see how its GNOME environment compares to my own. Hopefully I'll glean a few tips that will help me in my GNOMEish FreeBSD 7.3-release install.
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This is a book that I've requested our local library order. I've been wanting to try PC-BSD but I'm not a fan of KDE. Is it possible to install something like Fluxbox or xfce?
I recommend the book very highly - it's extremely well done, and Dru has a great way of making things understandable.
While KDE is the main desktop in PC-BSD, it installs with Fluxbox as an alternative, and you can choose it from the session menu when you log in. Way back when I actually had PC-BSD installed (in the 1.x days), I used Fluxbox with it - and it was extremely fast. I probably have a blog post from that time - I'll look for it.
You can install Xfce or GNOME via PBI - the "push-button installer" packages that PC-BSD uses.
It's very flexible, and if you don't want to spend a lot of time building from ports, PC-BSD is definitely for you.
The only reason I didn't install PC-BSD immediately this time around is that a) I wanted the full FreeBSD experience, b) I only wanted GNOME, not KDE and c) I'm working with a 20 GB hard drive, and while I'm not exactly sure how much disk space you need for PC-BSD, I don't remember it being small.
That said, I'm getting in the mood to give KDE another try, so PC-BSD is something I'm definitely looking at.
Here is my 2008 post on PC-BSD 1.3/1.4 ... not a ringing endorsement at the time:
http://www.insidesocal.com/click/2008/04/i-install-pcbsd-15-on-the-0-la.html