DesktopBSD 1.7 on VirtualBox
I've meant to do more BSD stuff on this channel. The earlier released of the common BSD's, like NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, were generally more difficult to setup, like with a lot of the earlier Linux distros. A lot of the ISO images preserved were simply bootstrappers that would connect to the Internet and download all the packages and finish the installation. Even after installation, it took effort to setup a BSD system, which explains why I haven't really look at this system in detail until now. BSD behaves much more like that of a traditional UNIX system.
Like with Linux, the BSD distros were released for the AMD64 platform as well. However, the story of BSD itself begins much earlier as a collection of utilities for the UNIX operating system. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, and was developed, as the name implies, by the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. The utilities developed were to enhance the UNIX operating system that had been developed by Bell Labs, AT&T R&D group. This included the TCP/IP protocol and associated programs. At that time, because AT&T was a government-sanctioned monopoly, they were compelled by law to give the AT&T source code to those who requested it, like the University of California.
Eventually, BSD developed into its own distinct OS supporting various CPU architectures. The original releases of BSD contained copyrighted AT&T code. Thus, later releases started to replace that code with open-source equivalents while the source code for BSD was made open-source. Around this time (early late 80's/early 90's), there was a demand for a UNIX-like OS that could run on commodity x86 hardware. A company, BSDi, took the source code, ported it to the 386, and released it as BSD/386, which then brought on a lawsuit with AT&T which charged that their OS still had copyrighted code in it. Because of the litigation going on, distribution of this OS stopped. As this was going on, Linux, another UNIX-like OS, this time written entirely from scratch, was already taking over.
There was AT&T code in BSD/386, just not much. After the code audit, that little code was removed and then the OS could be distributed in an open-source manner. However, due to loss time with AT&T, Linux had already taken a massive foothold in the server market that BSD was aiming for. Regardless, BSD started to make its mark felt, and by the middle 2000's, there were a decent variety of BSD distros. Some of them have already been mentioned like NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Some of the others, like DesktopBSD, was geared towards general desktop usage. A desktop BSD OS wouldn't be that far removed as one the most widely used desktop OS's in the world, Mac OSX, is BSD-based. OSX is based on Darwin, a BSD OS. (It seems though that the more recent OSX releases have moved away from Darwin though).
DesktopBSD was a desktop‑oriented operating system based on FreeBSD, created to make BSD approachable for non‑experts. It wasn’t a fork — it was essentially FreeBSD with a curated desktop experience, preconfigured tools, and a graphical installer. It shipped with KDE 3, made use of the FreeBSD Ports repository, and supported the x86 and x64 CPU architectures, with the AMD64 version shown here. One could describe Desktop BSD as “FreeBSD, but friendly.”. That probably explains why I haven't gotten to BSD until now.
VirtualBox is virtualizing a x64 multimedia PC with a single core allocated to it and 6GB's of RAM. The host has a Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core processor. There is a VESA Compatible display adapter installed with XFree86/X.org running at 1152 by 864 screen resolution. There is also an Intel PRO/1000 Mt Ethernet Adapter and a High-Definition Audio Device. There is a 16GB HD image mounted with DesktopBSD 1.7 AMD64 installed.
Songs Used
Ambient Drum n' Bass
By DJ Schnee
https://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/...
Amiga ExoticA Database
Software Used:
Recorded With OBS Studio
Composed In Kdenlive
Hardware Used:
PC equipped with a
AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU
6 Cores Running At 4.2GHz
AMD Radeon RX570 GPU
Windows 11