I have been running alpha versions of PC-BSD Hubble Edition for the last few weeks as iXsystems transitioned into a brand new production facility.  It’s been a pretty amazing process thus far.   It’s great to be a part of something as it’s growing, especially when the team feels more like a family than anything.  For a sneak peak of our new place, check out this video:

We implemented a django-based serial tracking system built on FreeBSD.  Systems and components will be scanned in at the assembly line (pictured below).  After a new order is placed, all systems in that order are scanned in, then each component is scanned in for each system so that we can easily locate one bad hard drive in an order (amongst several other things).  There are several stages to each build that are also tracked dynamically throughout the build process.  Obviously I can’t leak all the sexy details, though…

The workstations in production are running the PC-BSD operating system.  At the moment, we’re testing PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha on the Eee Box.  Our requirements were minimal: does the barcode scanner work? Yes. Does konqueror load the web app? Yes. Great! It’s production ready! I was going to use PC-BSD 7.1.1 instead of 8.0 because we would normally never put an alpha in a production environment.  In this case, the nic was too new and didn’t work properly in FreeBSD 7.2-PRERELEASE so I had to use FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 (PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha).

Here’s the latest screenshot I have of PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha running on my desktop at work.

That’s all for now. I’ll post more screenshots as I take them. Thanks for stopping by!

Recently, I traveled overseas to a tiny island about 5,000 miles East of California. I know, long flight. We landed in London, took two trains, a cab, and arrived at our destination: Cambridge University.

College town?! Sweet, that means college chicks, college parties, and kegstands!

We attended EuroBSDCon 2009 to volunteer at the FreeBSD Booth and demonstrate PC-BSD in all its glory! It was great to see the European BSD community’s interest in PC-BSD. I love seeing developers gather ’round the FreeBSD booth asking questions about PC-BSD. Kris Moore sat down with the port maintainer of firefox and worked out the printing problems, apparently CUPS support wasn’t enabled, oops! Now enabled, the iXsystems offices rejoice and printing has never been better….

PC-BSD Hubble Edition 8.0 is coming out soon, possibly by the end of the year or early 2010. I am pretty excited for the new integrated software updater/installer which installs programs from pbidir.com in 1 click. Also, we no longer have 2 localbases separating system packages with user-installed ones; the new solution is having a ports tree contained within a jail. This should be fun! I’ll die a happy man not having to remember to type in ‘runports’ ever again.

Download the latest alpha here: ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/alpha-iso/x32,

Join the testing list here: http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo.

Please complain!

Here’s a few pictures from Cambridge and London. I’ll have these organized in an album later

Dual Booting is a nice guy, once you get to know him.

Chances are, if you’ve got an Intel based mac, you’ve given some serious thought to dual booting, or you’ve done it already. Setting up Boot Camp and installing Windows XP or even Vista is hardly even a project. And with Apple handing you a driver disk, it’s not even tough to figure out things like graphics and wireless cards.

So maybe you’ve thought about installing and dual booting something OpenSource, like PC-BSD. It should work, right? It’s easy enough to do on a non-Apple system, and frees you from the Windows experience.

And why shouldn’t it work? Apple, after all, laid down the rails for OS X on what’s essentially FreeBSD. Okay okay, It’s Darwin. But Darwin is more or less just FreeBSD with out of date code. And hey, PC-BSD really is FreeBSD! It’s a match made in heaven, I’m telling you.

What you might not expect is that installing PC-BSD is almost as easy as installing Windows. It took some doing, and several reinstalls, and an accidental power loss, but I’m successfully dual booting MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and PC-BSD 7.1 (Galileo). You too can live the dream!