2011-03-20

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 March 13

There were a couple of posts that garnered quite a few comments. Anyway, I'll try to repost most of them.

Review: GhostBSD 2.0

An anonymous reader had this tip regarding changing the root password: "You could of course use "sudo passwd root" to change the root password..."
Commenter kelvin said, "Instead of writing all this crap you should of reinstalled it correctly as I did then you would find the package manager works correctly searches, updates, and installs as it says on the box. it is limited to 1 package at a time. The major let down for me was it does not mount flash-drives correctly only if inserted at boot time and does not unmount it mounts ntfs drives but not jfs. does not auto mount CDs which is a total bummer that is with 64bt The polish and start up times are pretty fast for bsd. pcbsd is testing gnome in the next version 9 so there should be good competition"
Regarding my issue with the aforementioned comment, another anonymous reader came to the rescue: "I think what he meant was that you should've installed it correctly, to hard drive. Doing all your reviews in VB without a good reason, like it did not install anywhere else, does not count. You said yourself you have not been able to test auto mounting because of that. It's a drawback and does not make for a proper review."
Yet another anonymous commenter had this support for the developers: "I have GhostBSD 2 installing after about 5 minutes on the live DVD and can't believe how easy it was. The live DVD is about as fast as any I have used and I know that some people like a graphical installer, but this is BSD after all. Anyone who remembers DesktopBSD knows the weaknesses of PC-BSD, great though that project is and GhostBSD seems to me to be following in DesktopBSD's footsteps. Keep it simple, close to FreeBSD itself but now with Gnome. Thanks to the GhostBSD developers"
Reader John said, "Thanks for the review of GhostBSD 2.0. it was a great read and I would honestly install it to a hard drive to feel the real speed of the OS. the install process in a VM is slower, this I have done my self when testing the release before we released it to the public. I have tested the install process across several single core and dual core computers and the time to install is right around 10 minutes(plus a minutes here and there depending upon the ram of the system). Us at the developing team have found that the lighter the system runs faster and if people would like the heaver software they can install it. I know bxpkg you can only install one piece of software at a time, this is done for the reason that where it could not cause problems on there desktop. bxpkg is new software and is also early in there stages. We have teamed up with them through our process and they will grow with GhostBSD. There is only one problem that I see you have no links going back to our site."
Following up on the last part, commenter jai ho had this to say, among other things: "as John said in above comment, it is really annoying that after reading a good review and we will decide to try it out and then there is no link to the site or download page from your site.. it may be a matter of searching in google but it is really annoying not to have the direct link from your site to the distro's site.. so if you can include a link to the distro's site in your future reviews it would really be helpful..thanks..."

Comparison Test: Fuduntu 14.9 vs. Fusion 14 "Thorium"

Fuduntu creator FEWT had this to say: "Thank you for the review! FYI, Fuduntu secured distribution licenses for our shipped codecs so we are completely legal in this regard. :D", later adding (partly in response to my question about what the comment would have been like had Fusion won), "@PV - I would have congratulated them, and taken action items of things to improve. We don't license libdvdcss, but we don't ship with it either fortunately. :D"

Reader Barnaby had this support: "Very interesting! Thanks!"
An anonymous commenter asked, "Could you please specify the source of your statement, 'Well, a judge ruled a couple months ago that things like libdvdcss2 are legal for personal viewing (but not a whole lot else).' TNX" (It has been done, worry not.)

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This week I have spring break, so I'll be able to post more freely, but ironically, aside from a review I'm planning to write as a guest post for another site, I don't have much planned. Anyway, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting! (Subscribing can be done easily on the right using any one of the multitude of widgets. Commenting can be done at the end of a post.)