First Rolling Release ISOs Available
Kris has announced the availabiity of the first rolling release:
As a few of you have already noticed, we have some new ISOs now up on the mirrors.
These are the first images built of PC-BSD Rolling Release, based upon FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE, which use PKGNG as the backend for keeping your desktop and base-system packages up to date. You are welcome to download and give them a spin if you want to help us beta-test them.
They include updated packages from about 2 weeks ago, which includes KDE 4.9.5 among others. Our build server is still finishing up building the entire package repository and I hope to have all ~20,000 pkgng packages online in another week or so, with weekly updates after that. The weekly updates will include all the latest PC-BSD / TrueOS utilities, so you can expect to see much more frequent bug fixes & enhancements.
For users running on the original PC-BSD / TrueOS 9.1 release, I also have an online system update in the works. This update will convert your existing install to PKGNG and allow you to start tracking the rolling release, the same as if you installed a fresh copy from our new ISOs. Once I’ve finished a bit more testing & bugfixing with it, I will post back with details on how to try it out. I’m hopeful it will be sometime next week.
Lastly, I also wanted to let you know that with this change, it will be possible convert an existing “FreeBSD” 9.1-Release into a PC-BSD or TrueOS system. I’ve started writing instructions on this PC-BSD wiki page with details.
Last but not least, we have some new hardware coming in soon which I will quickly get working on building a PC-BSD -STABLE release, and then -CURRENT. More details as they arrive 
Happy testing, and please post your feedback to the testing mailing list so we can get to work quashing bugs.
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Comments (42)
Awesome! Thank you very much Kris, Dru and everyone else.
Thanks!
Thank you for making this accessible for plain-old freebsd users. Finally I won’t be spending an hour compiling chromium.
You’re welcome!
I have two questions:
1) Is this warning from the PC-BSD handbook still valid for the “new” PC-BSD:
“NOTE: users are highly discouraged from using FreeBSD packages or ports or upgrade tools such as portupgrade or portversion from the PC-BSD® command line as Update Manager will remove your manually installed applications and upgrades.”
Because this was the main reason for not using PC-BSD until now. PC-BSD has many nice things, and there are cases where PBI are useful but I still want to be able to install and remove FreeBSD packages with pkg or from ports without them being removed by a PC-BSD upgrade.
2) I understand that now one can switch from FreeBSD to PC-BSD but will it be possible to switch back by for example changing the packagesite back to the FreeBSD one and running an pkg upgrade?
Kris suggests the following:
We can change this warning. Packages will be allowed, and I will even be working on a GUI front-end to them. However we still have to put out the caveat that packages are more dangerous than PBI’s, and if you remove the wrong thing you can end up breaking your desktop.
Yep, you can switch between repos, run “pkg upgrade -f” and be set.
It was time that BSD systems while maintaining standards of offering the ultimate in desktop applications. I support this initiative and I congratulate them for their hard work. Now to win the community ..
Hi,
How about the kernel itself? rolling release too? or only the packages got rolling release treatment?
Definitely the kernel as well, so users can take advantage of new drivers, etc.
Thanks! I will definitely install PCBSD again now.
Thanks so much for the hard word Guys/Gals! It is much appreciated. Can’t wait to try these ISO’s tonight.
Hi,
Thanks so much for the very good work. I have a problem with nvidia-driver, don’t want to install, it’s saying that it’s in conflict with linux-f10-dri and stop installing. The same thing with pcbsd-meta-nvidia.
I hope to use my nvidia because nv driver is very slow.
Just to be clear, this is on the first rolling release?
Go ahead and remove the linux-f10-dri package, then re-add nvidia-driver. (Or do package updates first). I’ve fixed it in a recent package set to not try and suck in that dri package
Thank you very much Kris and Dru for your helps. And what i can say that the new rolling release of PC-BSD are awesome, and we can install the system in a few minutes.
Thanks
What does Rolling Release mean?
Read this:
http://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/02/status-update-and-future-plans/
It explains it very well & it’s very awesome.
When will the original 9.1 upgrade option be available?
Can I update pcbsd to rolling release from the ISOs?
Kris came across a showstopper in the upgrade which he has now fixed. The upgrade should be available in the next day or so. If you install from ISO, the upgrade will show up in Upgrade Manager once it is available. If you have not installed yet, you can install from a rolling release ISO and future upgrades will also be available.
Cool, Thank you both!
Are you sure to embrace the full-rolling model. IMHO, a semi-rolling model (Chakra Linux comes to mind as a successful case) fits better.
What is your definition of a semi-rolling model?
Here is an Wikipedia entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release#Part-rolling_distributions
Also one from Chakra Linux’s FAQ page: http://chakra-linux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Frequently_Asked_Questions
Chakra is a good example to follow
But Chaka is only 64 bit, hard to install and unfriendly.And that’s not the philosophy of PC-BSDAnyway, it’s a good idea what you propose
I do not see how “64-bit”, “hard-to-install” and “unfriendly” relate to the release model.
Wonderful news! I can hardly wait to update to the latest 9.1.
I wish we all promote PcBSD more on any media possible.
Someday I wish my ARMv7 phone will run PcBSD too!
Having PC-BSD on cell phones would be very cool, but not sure if that is possible though. However I wouldn’t be surprised if people at PC-BSD have already thought about it.
Wow. It’s not easy. It need a lot of works to do beyond what you think.
Oh I do think that it would be a lot of work. However it is nice to dream of a world filled with servers, desktop and notebook computers, notepads and so on… all running on PC-BSD though.
[...] PC-BSD sada ima prvu rolling verziju koja je najavljena krajem februara. Izvor: PC-BSD blog [...]
Any updates you can give on the progression of the rolling release ISOs and packages? I ask because I was going to give it a go this weekend. It seems to be right in the time frame that Kris said “I hope to have all ~20,000 pkgng packages online in another week or so”
-Thanks
We’re at about 90% for the pkgng repo and will have a blog post about how to use it once they are all built.
Cool
[...] desenvolvedores do PC-BSD lançaram a primeira versão rolling release de sua distribuição, baseado no FreeBSD [...]
It was just Awesome! Thanks!
What about releasing ISOs via gotbsd torrents also?
Will the current PC-BSD 9.1 Release version still be supported ? I’ve never had great luck with rolling releases of any OS/Distro as stability is the one area that gets compromised.
Yes.
ATI Radeon 9600
Can not start x with radeonhd/ati(radeon)driver and start only with Vesa…
This will most likely remain the case until the TTM work is finished to allow full ATI/Radeon support: http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Hardware_Requirements#Supported_Video_Cards
[...] projet PC-BSD a récemment adopté une approche de celle des distributions à développement continu, pour ce qui concerne la [...]