Dramashack!

Some people are Mac, some are Windows, I am PC-BSD. PC-BSD is more than an operating system, it’s a lifestyle.

Sitting next to my 47” Westinghouse LCD TV is the iXsystems Apollo Workstation. This workstation is powered by the 5500 series of the Intel® Xeon® processor, an Asus GeForce 9800 GT video card, and 4 gigs of RAM. It came with PC-BSD Galileo Edition (7.1) pre-installed and a handful of applications that immediately increased my quality of life tenfold.

Using free software instead of spending hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on commercial software is great, especially because I enjoy dabbling in Photoshop, FL Studio, Sony Music Studio, as well as playing games such as Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2, and Eve Online.

First things first, can I play my favorite games? The answer (for me) is absolutely! I am a huge fan of Valve and their Steam client because I tend to scratch or lose CD’s. I created my Steam account in 2004 when I purchased Half-Life 2, although I never finished the game because my computer could not handle it. 45 minute loading screens do not work for me…

So, I forgot about Valve for awhile and moved on to other hobbies, namely music and web design. When I was away from my drumset, I was on my PC hacking away at local band websites, doing photomanipulation in Photoshop, or creating Classic Nintendo remixes in Sony Music Studio (formerly Acid Pro). I was also dual-booting random Linux distros (with much displeasure), because I got tired of the constant degredation of performance on my Windows box. I found that I couldn’t enjoy most of my computer related hobbies on Linux, and worse yet, most of the websites I was developing or visiting didn’t work or look the same. So I forgot about Linux for awhile, too.

Enter PC-BSD, one desktop to rule them all! The PC-BSD operating system truly changed my life. No more Windows, no more Linux, and all (okay most) of my hobbies intact. I replaced Photoshop with GIMP, Sony Music Studio with Ardour, and Dreamweaver with Bluefish. The transition from Windows to PC-BSD was fairly easy. Adapting to a new collection of programs and bugs was the hardest part, but didn’t stop me from pursuing a Windowless lifestyle. I am not against commercial software, I just prefer to spend money on open source software, hardware, and video games. This is where Valve comes back into the picture.

PC-BSD is for Gamers

One lazy afternoon, I was bored and thought I’d download the Steam client from steampowered.com and install it on PC-BSD. PC-BSD comes with Wine, so Steam installed without any problems. When I opened Steam and entered my account details, all the games I purchased in 2004 were waiting for me to install. I was feeling pretty lucky at this point, so I chose to install Half-Life 2 first. An hour or so later I launched Half-Life 2. There was only one problem, sound did not work. I was a little sad, but I turned captioning on and played for a minute, saved, loaded, and then quit. After a minute of searching on winehq.org I found out that all I needed to do was set the sound acceleration in winecfg to Emulation. After doing that, I launched Half-Life 2 again. This time sound worked perfectly.

Amazed at how beautiful the game looked, I pressed my luck and maxed out the graphic settings to include full bloom and reflection. Victory! To see what the FPS was, I opened the developer console and typed ‘cl_showfps 1′ and the result was a steady 300 frames per second. Simply amazing.

After playing Half-Life 2 for a few hours I hopped on Deathmatch and CounterStrike: Source. Both worked flawlessly. Pretty pleased with Valve at this point, I went to http://store.steampowered.com and purchased Left 4 Dead which also worked flawlessly on PC-BSD. The next Steam game I tried was Overlord II, which didn’t work at all, but Assassin’s Creed from Ubisoft played wonderfully. In the end, 4 of the 5 games I tested ended up playing better on my PC-BSD machine than any Windows box I have ever owned.

PC-BSD is for Music Lovers

Life is not all fun and games. You need to mix things up with music too. There are many choices for audio players on PC-BSD. My personal choice is Amarok. Amarok has an easy to use and intuitive interface and comes with great features like displaying lyrics, downloading album art, and connecting to your Last.fm account, just to name a few. If you have a Last.fm account, you will also enjoy the Last.fm PBI on pbidir.com. The Last.fm application is an easy to use radio alternative. I tend to use it at work when I get bored of my local collection. Another great alternative to the traditional FM radio is Pandora.com, and it too works flawlessly on PC-BSD.

Pandora allows you to create a radio station based on your personal tastes. As you give songs a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, Pandora takes into account several attributes and plays similar songs. For example, the acoustic version of Creep by Radiohead has pop rock qualities, acoustic sonority, repetitive melodic phrasing, major key tonality, and a dynamic male vocalist. Mix this with say, Cannibal Corpse, and you’ll have a unique blend of music in constant rotation.

After listening to music for awhile I tend to get the musician’s itch. If this happens and I don’t have a band to jam with, I open up Ardour and start recording, editing, and mixing my own music. Ardour is very similar to Cubase, Nuendo, Adobe Audition, etc… But like any program, it has its quirks. After a few hours of use you’ll feel right at home. Ardour does multichannel recording, non-linear, non-destructive region based editing with unlimited undo and redo capabilities. It also features full automation support, an amazing mixer, and plenty of plugins to tweak and shape sound to your heart’s content. I’ve had it crash a few times, but I found that turning off auto-crossfade solved this problem. In the near future I am going to set up a completely open source recording studio for my fellow musical geeks and I to create “open music” for the masses.

PC-BSD is for Movie Buffs

PC-BSD has several applications for playing DVDs. I chose Xine. Xine can play CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It will also decode AVIs, MOVs, WMVs, and MP3s from your local collection, as well as play multimedia streamed from the net. If I’m not watching a DVD in Xine, I’m using Miro as my open source alternative to DVR and Cable television. I ditched paying for cable over a year ago. Using Miro made this possible. I have all my favorite television shows auto-download as they are released using various RSS torrent feeds. Miro can play most video files and offers over 6,000 free internet TV shows and video podcasts. Watching Lost in HD on my 1080p 47” television is a wonderful experience.

Occasionally, I want to watch a TV show instantly. That’s when I go to Hulu.com. Hulu.com is an amazing site that streams HD television shows and movies over the internet using Flash. All of this is done while I am lounging on my couch using a wireless mouse and keyboard on my coffee table. And if watching movies isn’t enough, editing video is a snap with Kdenlive. Kdenlive is a non-linear video editor for PC-BSD that is designed for basic or semi-professional video editing. It supports DV, AVCHD (which is considered experimental), and HDV editing. There are other video editors out there, but Kdenlive was the easiest to get the job done.

PC-BSD is for Everyone!

Whether you’re a gamer, music connoisseur, movie enthusiast, or all of those, PC-BSD is the operating system for you. For more information or to download PC-BSD, visit http://pcbsd.org. To download PC-BSD software, visit http://pbidir.com.