The following PBIs are now available through Software Manager:

SILC client: SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) is a protocol which provides secure conferencing services in the Internet over an insecure channel. SILC is IRC like although internally they are very different. Biggest similarity between SILC and IRC is that they both provide conferencing services and that SILC has almost same commands as IRC. Other than that they are nothing alike.

KPorts: KPorts is a KDE-frontend to the FreeBSD Ports collection. You can browse and search through your ports tree and perform actions like upgrades, installs, and uninstalls.

Fio: Fio is an I/O testing tool that will spawn a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of I/O action as specified by the user. Fio can be driven by a ‘job file’ describing the I/O load one wants to simulate.

Banshee: Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee‘s simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported.

ATAidle: ATAidle is a utility to set the power management features of ata hard drives. This includes standby timeouts, power (APM) and acoustic (AAM) level settings, and it can show details about the installed devices.

Thanks to Jesse Smith and Bruce Cran for creating these PBIs and to draconian, mbybee, and kmf for requesting them.

The following PBI is now available through Software Manager:

Claws Mail: an e-mail client and news reader based on GTK+. Currently, many features are supported including POP3, IMAP, NNTP, multiple accounts, threading, filtering, MIME attachments, APOP, SMTP AUTH, SSL, IPv6, GnuPG, internalization, and more.

Thanks to Jesse Smith for creating this PBI and to draconian for requesting the PBI.

The following PBIs are now available through Software Manager:

Logwatch: a customizable, pluggable log-monitoring system. It will go through your logs for a given period of time and make a report in the areas that you wish with the detail that you wish.

GnuCash: the next generation of money manager created from a merger of X-Accountant and GnoMoney.

Thanks to Jesse Smith for creating these PBIs and to jmdennis for requesting the GnuCash PBI.

The following PBI is now available through Software Manager:

SuperTuxKart: a Free 3d kart racing game; we want to make the game fun more than we want to make it realistic. You can play with up to 4 friends on one PC racing against each other, or just try to beat the computer.

Thanks to Jesse Smith for creating this PBI.

The following PBIs are now available through Software Manager:

OpenTTD: a clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a popular Microprose game originally written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.

Amanda: a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive.

Thanks to Jesse Smith for creating these PBIs.

A PBI module has been created for MythTV, but we need testers to see if it works and to provide feedback on its usage. Testing this PBI will also allow feedback on whether the current webcamd drivers support TV tuner cards and to ensure that the webcam man pages are accurate regarding those cards. I suspect that MythTV on PC-BSD will be a process as we discover what hardware is supported, get some usage docs written, and fix any PBI and/or webcam glitches that are discovered along the way.

If you’d like to try out the PBI, download the one that is appropriate for your architecture.

• 32 bit
• 64 bit

To install, you can either double-click the downloaded PBI in sudolphin or, as the superuser, install it with the /PCBSD/Scripts/runpbi.sh /PATH/TO/PBI command.

Wikipedia indicates that you’ll also need a supported TV tuner card or a firewire connection to a digital set-top box.

We’ll be revamping the Multimedia section of the Handbook for 9.0. For now, I’ve started a placeholder for MythTV. Feel free to add the results of your tests there. You can also leave a comment here or on the pbi-dev mailing list.