vakkotaur

Checking out DistroWatch to if there was any new or upgraded Linux or BSD distribution, I saw a supposedly new BSD, PCBSD. It looked promising. It's pretty much FreeBSD but with a supposedly friendlier installer and set up to be a desktop OS right off. This is something that BSD has been lacking. Sure, you run BSD on the desktop after some fiddling around, but many would prefer not to fiddle around thus.

So far, so good. Then I looked at the licensing and got a nasty surprise. The core was BSD licensed, of course, but "All software custom developed for PC-BSD is released under the GNU General Public License..." It's not BSD. It's a bad hybrid. Sure, I know some applications, such as KDE, are unavoidably GPL and it makes some sense to use them. But to specifically make improvements to a BSD and then license them under GPL is grating in its wrongness. I can only hope that BSD folks look at the idea and decide it'd be good to do it right. I don't want to see some addlepated chucklehead calling for a renaming to "GNU/BSD" - the avoidance of such idiocy is one of the more attractive features of BSD.

Current Mood: irritated

The bad news is that the CDRW of FreeSBIE wouldn't boot from the CD drive. But I did get it going. And an attempt at a hard drive install failed. Evidently I may need to adjust partition sizes. I tried using it as a LiveCD but it seems to find and ignore serial pointers too, dagnabbit.

The good news is that a boot managing floppy does its job quite well. I think _dakko pointed it out to me a while ago. This does exactly what it claims to do. I made a floppy from the downloaded image and use it to get to the CD that wasn't booting. So the night wasn't a complete waste. At least I have a boot floppy that will let me start from devices that aren't fully cooperating.

Current Mood: tired

Last night masem pointed out that /. mentioned a LiveCD Roundup article and yakko quipped that I'd likely tried them all. Not quite, but I have tried a couple of them (Beatrix, knoppix), tried a few that weren't mentioned (DeadCD, Feather, Vector) . A couple that I have yet to try look interesting. I might try PCLinuxOS and Mandrake Move on a faster machine now. And I might have a look at FreesBie and consider running a BSD.