bsdtalk201 - PC-BSD 9 Alpha with Kris Moore

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This is an interview of Kris Moore of PC-BSD. This Interview is from MeetBSD. All the exciting new changes are going to be in PC-BSD 9. (Which means its based on FreeBSD 9)

The biggest change is the addition of new window environments. They are no longer KDE centric. Before there was some choice of window managers, but now there is a big change to the back end with the addition of PC-BSD meta packages so you can manage the parts of your desktop that you want.

Some of the features from FBSD that they are most excited about is softupdates with journaling and USB 3.0.

The 2nd biggest PC-BSD change is a re-implementation of the PBI package infrastructure. Its now shell driven instead of QT4. The new QT4 gui sits on top of that, so you won't notice the changes much.

They also reduce disk space by sharing libraries. PBIs are now signed from the build server. They have added binary patches and they store binary diffs. This will reduce upgrade time, especially for slow connections.

They have added pbi -r features to remotely get pbi format packages.

First PC-BSD 9.0 Alpha Snapshot Available for Testing

Kris Moore has just announced that the first testing snapshot is available for download (both 32 and 64 bit versions). You can help us make 9.0 an awesome release by trying out the snapshots (there will be many between now and the first beta some time next spring) and providing feedback about any bugs you find. Since these are testing snapshots, it is recommended that you try them out on a spare system or using a virtual environment such as VirtualBox. If you're planning on trying out all of the new desktop environments, you should use a virtual machine of at least 20 GB. 



You can read the rest here.