Hope we have something similar to wvdial in place for 9.0 ? I am just revisiting this after a long time. If you need me to test something with my modem i would be happy to do the same as well.

Thanks,

Bsdnewbie

We’ll look at usb-modeswitch again. IIRC, the last time we looked at this we were told it was deprecated by the new USB framework, but we’ll doublecheck that.

Can you double-check your custom partitioning. I’m pretty sure you can custom partition on any selected partition.

appreciate great work in popularising a awesome OS like FREEBSD.

I have a small suggestion :
I would request for wvdial pre installed in 9.0 release, I hope this can be done as it simplifies configuration of 3g modems,phone tethering etc in BSD. I do see there are few posts in bsd forums on the very
same topic.

The other package i would request for is usb-modeswitch. This automatically convertes a usb modem when detected as a mass storage device to be converted to switch to a modem

Other OS’s like ubuntu also has this and also has profiles for various isp’s around the world…i guess including or even planning to include these pacakages would be a welcome first step.

Other suggestion is to allow custom [artitioning during install. The installer only allows for custom partitioning when we select option use entire drive(or did i get this wrong ? )
for example there are issues like say if we select to install everything with autopartition like ports/open office ,source and all the software it does end up with no space in a partition and KDE doesnt start ..

thanks for patient reading ….good luck..

bsdnewbie

I apologize ahead of time if wordpress mangles the urls and sticks them at the beginning of this comment. To address your points:

You can always reach me at dru at freebsd dot org.

The hostname/timezone has been fixed for 9.0. You can see the screenshots for what’s new in the installer at http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/PC-BSD_9_Handbook (I’ll be updating these as 9.0 changes during the testing phase).

I know some webcam stuff was fixed since 8.1 was released. Please test webcam when the 8.2 beta is available so we can make sure that everything is now working. I’m also working on man pages for webcamd and all of its drivers so hopefully these are available soon (definitely in time for 8.2).

I’ve been working on updating the http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Installing_Applications section of the Handbook. Please leave comments on the Discussion page for any page that is still unclear or did not answer everything you were hoping for.

The 9.0 control panel will no longer mix both KDE and PC-BSD stuff (e.g. system and services manager). Also, I updated the http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/System_Manager page last week. Again, use the Discussion tab if the information on the page is still unclear or incomplete.

We’ll be adding help text to PC-BSD menus in 9.0 and you can help us write the text at http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Help_Text_for_PC-BSD_Menus. Again, the System Manager page of the Handbook was updated as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

If a PBI you need is missing, please add it to the PBI Requests forum (http://forums.pcbsd.org/forumdisplay.php?f=61).

Please report any bugs in existing PBIs to http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/pbi-dev so they can be fixed.

You’re welcome!

–

I am not first hand PC-BSD user but I do occasionally install PC-BSD for my
friends and family. And as I have just installed the latest version 8.1 for a
friend, I would like to share my experiences and comments with you.

I used USB image and installation was smooth. However, there is no place to
specify hostname and timezone during installation. And timezone cannot be
easily changed afterward as KDE’s Date/Time settings pane has no admin mode.
So I had to change it from command line. This has been issue AFAIR.

Computer used had USB webcam attached. As audio device it supports recording
only but it was selected as default device and I had to change it in
loader.conf. Built-in ICH audio device was enumerated as pcm1. Not good.
Checking console messages it seemed webcamd was being started 3 times. It
failed with message like “ld-elf cannot find libcuse4bsd.so.1″ but I could see
the lib was available (at /usr/local/lib IIRC).

I wanted to install ddclient but did not understand what ports jail is for.
Also the handbook mentions runports command but that was not available from
shell. So I just used pkg_add -r.
Btw, when I ran portversion -v it errored out (due to dependencies broken) and
I had to run pkgdb -F just to find out that several ports (kde*) had
dependencies that were not installed (fonts usually). Please note that this
was freshly installed system without any modifications. (!)

In “System Manager/Settings” (?) there are two buttons to download the ports
tree. Why? What’s the difference ?
Similarly there are Services Manager and Service Manager, one PC-BSD’s and
other KDE’s, both having same icon. Things like these are confusing.

There’s a check box to enable DMA for ATAPI but no tooltip explanation.
Perhaps there should be a check box to disable ZFS module loading, especially
on i386.

There are not enough PBIs available at pbidir. If you want users to use ports
than a GUI should be provided. But I suggest PBIs is the way. And I remember
long time ago it was announced that PBIs can be automatically created from
ports yet there are so few of them at pbidir. Also I could not find some I
used with PC-BSD 7.x (especially Wine based (e.g. IE)).

And btw Skype PBI is broken — upon installation Skype launched from KDE menu
is run under admin. When run from command line it works OK.

Well, this is enough for now as I am already sleepy.
Please make use of or forward this information as appropriate.
And thank you for all your work!

Regards.