Freesbie – BSD on LiveCD!

Yesterday I got around my free time to try out Freesbie, a BSD LiveCD based on FreeBSD.

The LiveCD is nice, as it boot on several of my pc without any problem. Upon booting, you’ll be presented with the typical FreeBSD boot screen. After that a screen will prompt you to your keyboard layout and your locale. The last screen will prompt you to choose whether you want to boot into console (tcsh), fluxbox or Xfce (GUI mode).

Upon entering Xfce window manager I could connect to internet instantly using DHCP, but as a challange, I tried to connect the internet through manual dialing using dial-up modem and adsl modem, both works perfectly!

Freesbie also took the initiatives to mount all mountable partitions it could find (Linux partition, vfat partitions, UFS partitions) and really ease the job. My USB drive also are detectable and mounted upon insertion (hotplug-style). Making everyday work a breeze.

The thing that I’m not fond of Freesbie is, the default user of the system is “root”. Well, that makes me a bit nervous when working with freesbie, because user apps is running as superuser priviledges.

FreeBSD includes movie player and xmms player, but unfortunately i cant enjoy any of it because the freesbie developer neglect to include my soundcard module “fm-801” inside the cd. So if your soundcard is not listed in the screenshot below, then you will have a mute freesbie box :

I must say that the choice of application included in Freesbie is friendly to home/average user (well since most people tells me BSD is for elite people, which i personally believe untrue), It includes among others, openoffice suite, moz firefox webbrowser, xchat irc client, gaim instant-messenger, thunderbird email client, bittorrent client and many goodies.

The LiveCD also double as installer cd as you can install a fully working FreeBSD 5.3 in your system. With stable internet connection, you can cvsup it to the current release of FreeBSD.

Overall, Freesbie is an nice LiveCD based on BSD, which offers usability for users who want to try out BSD-based operating system without messing up with their hdd. It’s convenient to use, and newbie friendly too, I hope that I can continue to see a better Freesbie in the future. :)