At KnoxBUG this month I saw Joe Maloney introduce his latest project in collaboration with Jaron Parsons, http://www.furybsd.org/
FuryBSD is a FreeBSD-based live desktop image and installer with the goal of being a streamlined way to test and run FreeBSD as a desktop operating system. The “LiveCD” ISO can be written to a USB memory stick and contains a FreeBSD OS on a ramdisk that boots directly into SDDM and automatically logs into an XFCE session.
The installer will copy the running config from the ramdisk to your target disk leveraging the familiar bsdinstall framework. That means effortless root on ZFS with boot environments!
According to Maloney, FuryBSD is focused on achieving compatibility with desktop hardware through carefully-tuned out-of-the-box configuration of FreeBSD. In contrast to other projects that have sought to tweak the user interfaces of the FreeBSD system through boutique wrapper utilities, FuryBSD retains the rugged but familiar FreeBSD administration experience, without the initial desktop installation hassle.
The roadmap also boasts plans for easy Nvidia driver setup and a pkg repo with desktop-oriented ports configurations.
A video recording of the KnoxBUG presentation should become available in the near future. Until then, check out http://www.furybsd.org/ and give FuryBSD a try today!
Pretty painless experience (once you get the network figured out).
Typing is awful because the touchpad is very sensitive and has no scrolling capability. There is also no wifi. So it’s a pretty minimal experience but the whole process took less than 10 minutes!
Gonna figure out trackpad and wifi and see if it’s worth keeping it on the Thinkpad.
FreeBSD has the bsdconfig command, especially helpful with wifi iirc. Joe used that to set up the network settings in his demo, I forget what he said about it though.
However i pine for the days where distros (linux included) would actually provide a hardware compatibility list.
The whole “buy hardware that supports linux” (or BSD in this case) argument is pretty damn irrelevant when there’s no way to determine this from the website.
That’s one of the reasons this is a cool project. You can just take a USB stick with the live system on it to the store and try it to see what works and what doesn’t.