PC-BSD 9.1 - Login and Control Panel

v 0.2

18 Jan 13

The first time you start PC-BSD it goes into the initial configuration, asking language, locale, checking you are happy with your video resolution and setting the root password and creating an account for you.  You are then presented with the log-in screen.  Highlight your name, and before entering your password if you look at the bottom status bar, you will see a number of selectors, one of which is for the desktop you wish to use.  Default is KDE, but I prefer Gnome or LXDE.  For the rest of this, I'll use Gnome2 as the reference (it seems to be faster than KDE) as we look around.  It is pretty much the same for all the Desktops.

Once the initial first time screens are presented when you log in, you see the desktop.  On the left are six icons if you are in Gnome.  Whilst all my autoconfiguration tasks completed successfully, there was one time they didn't - I had no network capability.  This was solved by going to the network configuration the control panel. so ...

PC-BSD Control Panel

I'm not going to go through every item here, but there are a few that are of initial interest. 

• Under System management, the "About" selection gives you information about your system (obviously). 
• Hardware compatibility tells you about your Video driver, resolution, whether the ethernet device is connected, wifi and the Sound device. 
• The Network Configuration opens to a screen with a list of Network adapters - I highlighted the one (there was only one for me) and pressed the "configure" button.  I found that the device had been disabled with a check box in the bottom left hand corner - I unchecked it and then "apply" and "close".  Can't remember whether I restarted or not, but the problem was fixed.
• There is a gui Firewall Manager - doesn't get easier than this.
• "System Manager" - this is worth looking at.  It chooses the PC-BSD mirror you use for installing packages, which system packages you want to install and enables you to download the ports tree.

Services and Startup Applications

There are two places to see what applications and services start automatically.

• System management > Service Manager
• Desktop environment > Startup Applications

Tools

• Life Preserver - this is the system backup program - it allows you to schedule your backups to a remote server if you wish
• Warden - this application allows you to configure and manage your "Jails".  A note here would not do it all justice.

AppCafe

AppCafe is both a separate icon on the desktop and included in the Control Panel.  When you start it, it connects to a repository and presents you with an extensive list of applications you can install on your system.  Many applications are quite large - larger than you would expect.  The reason for this is that PC-BSD installs the application AND its dependencies for each application.  Yes it takes more room but it also removes the "dependency hell" that can exist when different applications expect different versions of a library.

I have not covered all selections - my aim was to cover some of the areas that were of initial interest to me and may be to you.  Once you get started, it is easy to move on from there.  Next I'll look at some of the applications that come "out of the box" and some minor issues, such as the "Attack of the Smurfs" when watching Youtube.


Later ....