Guest post by It’s been a long time coming, but a brand new release of VirtualBSD is out: “VirtualBSD 8.1 is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE based on the Xfce 4.6 Desktop Environment and, being distributed as VMware appliance, it makes dead easy to take FreeBSD for a test drive.” The best part? Not only are the most common aplications available out of the box, this is a genuine FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, which means that if you go past the desktop you’ll be dealing with The Real Thing. You can take a look at the screenshots, go to the download page or, if you’re impatient, just grab the torrent file.
Doesn’t look bad. BSD is lagging so much on the desktop.
How’s the freebsd+flash situation? Still sad?..
How can anything related to flash not be sad?!
That’s why there is HTML5. Anything related to flash like proprietary software for Internet is harmful to everyone.
That’s why there is HTML5. Anything related to flash like proprietary software for Internet is harmful to everyone.
Too bad that HTML 5 is a future technology and everything, anyone would want to view, on the web is encapsulated with flash most of the time. So flash support is important today and handwaving with HTML 5 doesn’t cut it.
It takes about that to have working Flash under Firefox/Midori:
/etc/rc.conf
linux_enable=”YES”
# pkg_add -r linux_base-f10
# pkg_add -r linux-f10-nspr
# pkg_add -r linux-f10-sqlite3
# pkg_add -r linux-f10-curl
# pkg_add -r linux-f10-libssh2
# pkg_add -r linux-f10-nss
# pkg_add -r nspluginwrapper
# pkg_add -r firefox35
# pkg_add -r midori
# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-f10-flashplugin10 && make install clean
% nspluginwrapper -v -i $( find / -name libflashplayer.so )
If You want to have working Flash in Opera, then You additionaly need to install this port:
# pkg_add -r opera-linuxplugins
Exactly, but there’s no need for that when running VirtualBSD as we wanted to provide a desktop ready FreeBSD right out of the box.
Reece Tarbert
Do you have any plans for adding a VBox image alongside VMWare?
Last time we checked (i.e., early 2009 with VirtualBox 2.x and VirtualBSD 7.1) it more or less worked, but no OS additions (the counterpart of VMware tools) were available for FreeBSD, which meant:
– no real full screen mode
– no drag’n’drop between host and guest
– no cut&paste between host and guest
– clicking inside the window “grabbed” the mouse
As far as I know the same problems are still there, but we haven’t checked with the latest VirtualBox yet, so there’s a chance that the situation has improved in the meantime.
That said, creating/distributing/maintaining an additional image is probably a bit too much for a tiny team like ours, and the best we could do is post some instructions about the customizations to be made.
Reece
Edited 2011-01-05 13:04 UTC
It would seem there are guest additions available for FreeBSD: http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox (scroll to ‘Guest Additions for FreeBSD guests’).
IIRC VBox also supports images from other virtulisation solutions such as VMWare – so, unless I’m wrong, you could create your generic VMWare image and then, before adding VMWares’s additions, make a copy of that image and then install VMware’s additions on one copy and VBox’s guest additions on the other.
In fact, if you have an image of VBSD w/o VMWare additions installed, I’m happy to have a quick play to test this theory for you
Edited 2011-01-05 13:33 UTC
Or, the end-user could just load the VMWare image, and install the VBox additions manually. It’s not like it’s an impossible, or even hard, task.
But that would defeat the whole point of “working out of the box” which is the central aim of VirtualBSD and a point quoted even within this very thread by one of the guys behind this release.
I wouldn’t have even raised this question otherwise, so please do keep up :p
Edited 2011-01-05 22:34 UTC
It’s a bit more complicated than that:
1) You can’t double click on an icon but need to create a new virtual machine and select the hard disk from the archive — and be sure to select the first chunk.
2) Network would work right away, but not sound (changing one line in /boot/loader.conf according to the remarks would fix the problem).
3) open-vm-tools should be removed to avoid conflicts and error messages.
4) virtualbox-ose-additions should be installed and possibly virtualbox-ose-kmod too.
5) /etc/X11/xorg.conf should be modified.
6) Possibly a couple of other minor things too, but… you get the idea!
We could look into this sometime next week and, assuming the results are good enough, maybe provide a script that takes care of all of the above (minus creating a new virtual machine, of course).
Excellent. Please do keep us updated on how the testing goes (positive or negative).
Not really, unless you haven’t been looking for a long time!
The applications available are largely the same compared to Linux and, what’s not available natively, can usually be run via emulation (like the Flash plugin, for instance). Or you were referring to Windows and OS X?
Someome wrote: “One of my definitions of desktop ready is whether I can see YouTube videos out-of-the-box” and the screenshots clearly shows YouTube running, so I should say no, not sad at all.
Reece Tarbert
I can’t confirm that – using it exclusively on my home desktop since version 4.0, and ‘ve been doing all the “fancy stuff” for years, never missed a thing. What have I been doing wrong?
VirtualBSD really looks interesting. I wish there would be a fully functional german version of it to share. I also like the intended look & feel that makes me think it would maybe resemble a certain OS from Cupertino. Xfce is relatively lightweight, but brings all the bells, whistles, dancing bunnies and bling that “average” desktop users are traditionally expecting.
The idea of releasing a VMware image is good – especially for “just want to try it” users, I wish they would also release an installable version of it (doesn’t even need an installer, just the image, and let the user do the last tweaks in relation to X) – for the real fun.
I’m interested in how far the “out of the box” experience includes the ability to play various media formats. The idiotic codec trouble – you know – often makes things complicated in terms of providing the full set of codecs and player software, because it’s illegal to play MP3s in the US.
You can select you preferred language from the login screen (look at the bottom after selecting the user, click on Other… and pick your language). Not all sofware has been localized, though.
That would be nice but also quite a lot of work with drivers and stuff — not too mention that both PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are available and quite good. As you said, VirtualBSD is really meant to give you a taste of FreeBSD.
VLC is part of the installation, so…
Reece
Throw in an modern AMD GPU (HD5xxx and up) or install FreeBSD on an intel Ironlake machine and you’ll see exactly how BSD is lagging.
Adam
Well I’m sold.
I will give this a play tonight.