Open Warrior

My siblings just got new laptops and have been going crazy using our home ADSL connection for YouTube and other large bandwidth hogging sites. Now anyone who’s used the internet in South Africa knows how ridiculously our monopoly telephone service provider, Telkom, overcharges us, and how limited bandwidth is. To deal with the problem of limited bandwidth and many internet users at home I decided I would have to set up a gateway box, which could record and manage bandwidth usage.

Now I’ve always had an inkling towards FreeBSD as an alternative to Linux , so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to give it a try as a home server. While browsing the FreeBSD site, I came across a link to the PC-BSD site – so, being the inquisitive individual I am, I headed over to the site to have a look.

PC-BSD is basically FreeBSD customised for use on the desktop. Now, it just happened that the hard drive that my desktop operating system was installed on was 99% full, was starting to fail and thus needed replacing. I took it as a sign – forget the server for now, the universe was telling me that it was time to install BSD on the desktop.

I downloaded the iso’s from my university (UCT) Linux Enthusiasts Group and popped them in to start the installation, and wow! Was I impressed! PC-BSD by far, has the best installer I’ve ever seen. It’s beautiful, elegant, professional and (perhaps most importantly) simple. After several clicks I was successfully installing PC-BSD, and as a nice extra touch I was presented with reassuring messages such as, “outstanding commercial support,” and “secure by default,” throughout the install process.

After the installation I booted up into PC-BSD and everything worked perfectly, from playingl movies, to full mp3 support, 3D desktop with Compiz-Fuzion, and anything else you’d want from a desktop.

All in all I’m very happy with PC-BSD and it also appears to be faster that Kubuntu Feisty I was using in the past. For me there was a bit of a learning curve since I’ve been using Linux for 5 years now, and even though my switch to BSD was smooth, I did get stuck every now and then when configuring services and working at the command line. But I managed to overcome all those problems after a few minutes.

I’ll encourage everyone who uses desktop Linux (and even Windows) to give PC-BSD a try – you may be pleasantly surprised.