FURYBSD 12.1
As he attempts another Bsd-based desktop, Mayank Sharma is furious with himself for picking review candidates without first taking them for a spin.
As he attempts another Bsd-based desktop, Mayank Sharma is as furious with himself for picking review candidates without first taking them for a spin.
We got off on the wrong foot here: there isn’t any inherent structural weakness in FURYBSD. In fact the project is headed by a long-time FREEBSD developer who knows what he’s doing. Although FURYBSD isn’t the only one to promise to deliver a functional desktop on top of a FREEBSD base, it distinguishes itself with its technical differences.
FURYBSD developers take pride in the fact that their OS doesn’t tinker with its FREEBSD base. This means with FURYBSD you are actually running a FREEBSD installation. The project considers itself a vessel to install FREEBSD. If the project disappears you could continue updating your installation as usual.
On the downside though, FURYBSD developers admit that their approach prevents them from being adventurous like their peers. This translates to FURYBSD being a very bare installation with very few components over and above the graphical desktop.
The latest release is based on FREEBSD 12.1 and packs in the latest quarterly packages from the FREEBSD repository. The OS is available with two desktop environments in separate ISO images. There’s one based on Xfce 4.14 that’ll perform well on under-equipped machines, while the other has KDE Plasma 5.17 and is meant for well-stocked computers.
One of the highlights of the project is its live CD. However, to keep it true to its FREEBSD base most of the innovation is behind the scenes. The Live CD boots to an almost untouched desktop environment, though it does include icons for three notable additions. The System Information icon fires up the browser and uses phpsysinfo to display basic details about the computer’s hardware and resource usage. Then there’s the Getting Started document that lists a series of commands for setting up various essential components in the system, such as the network and the graphics hardware.
The most interesting is the Configure Xorg, which enables users to try various Intel and Nvidia drivers to zero in on one that works with their graphics hardware. This is the realisation of the project’s objective of enabling users to test whether their hardware is compatible with FREEBSD before committing the OS to their disk.
You can press then anchor FURYBSD to your computer. The OS uses a FREEBSD installer, which is unintuitive and is a far cry from the polished distro installers Linux users are used to. Make sure you look through the installation guide on the project’s online wiki before you embark.
The live session automatically reboots once the installation completes. Every change you’ve made in the live session is carried over to the installation automatically, including the choice of drivers for the graphics hardware. This is a good thing since the
Configure Xorg utility isn’t available in the installation. Neither are the Getting Started and the System Information icons, since they’ve served their purpose of helping you determine whether the peripherals in your computer will work with the OS.
Post installation, FURYBSD doesn’t offer much to write home about. You get a bare desktop with no real usable apps besides Firefox. The app menu contains a launcher for an email client, even though it doesn’t bundle one out of the box. You’ll have to flesh out the installation, which again is more of a chore than it might sound as the OS doesn’t include a graphical package manager.
Using FURYBSD in its current state might sound frustrating, but it is in line with its listed objectives. The developers will continue focusing on refining the live environment before shifting focus to enhance the postinstall experience in 2021, adding conveniences like a tweak tool to configure aspects of the installation.