TrueOS

TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD or PCBSD) is a discontinued Unix-like, server-oriented operating system built upon the most recent releases of FreeBSD-CURRENT.

Up to 2018, it aimed to be easy to install by using a graphical installation program, and easy and ready-to-use immediately by providing KDE SC, Lumina, LXDE, MATE, or Xfce as the desktop environment. In June 2018, the developers announced that since TrueOS had become the core OS to provide a basis for other projects, the graphical installer had been removed. Graphical end-user-oriented OSes formerly based on TrueOS were GhostBSD and Trident. TrueOS provided official binary Nvidia and Intel drivers for hardware acceleration and an optional 3D desktop interface through KWin, and Wine is ready-to-use for running Microsoft Windows software. TrueOS was also able to run Linux software in addition to FreeBSD Ports collection and it had its own .txz package manager. TrueOS supported OpenZFS and the installer offered disk encryption with geli.

Development of TrueOS ended in 2020.

History TrueOS was founded by FreeBSD professional Kris Moore in early 2005 as PC-BSD. In August 2006 it was voted the most beginner-friendly operating system by OSWeekly.com.

The first beta of the PC-BSD consisted of only a GUI installer to get the user up and running with a FreeBSD 6 system with KDE3 pre-configured. This was a major innovation for the time as anyone wishing to install FreeBSD would have to manually tweak and run through a text installer. Kris Moore's goal was to make FreeBSD easy for everyone to use on the desktop and has since diverged even more in the direction of usability by including additional GUI administration tools and .pbi application installers. PC-BSD's application installer management involved a different approach to installing software than many other Unix-like operating systems, up to and including version 8.2, by means of the pbiDIR website.pbiDIR Instead of using the FreeBSD Ports tree directly (although it remained available), PC-BSD used files with the .pbi filename extension (Push Button Installer) which, when double-clicked, brought up an installation wizard program. An autobuild system tracked the FreeBSD ports collection and generated new .pbi files daily. All software packages and dependencies were installed from inside of the .pbi files into their own self-contained directories in /Programs. This convention was aimed to decrease confusion about where binary programs reside, and to remove the possibility of a package breaking if system libraries are upgraded or changed, and to prevent dependency hell.

On October 10, 2006, PC-BSD was acquired by enterprise hardware provider iXsystems. iXsystems employed Kris Moore as a full-time developer and leader of the project. In November 2007, iXsystems entered into a distribution agreement with Fry's Electronics whereby Fry's Electronics stores nationwide carry boxed copies of PC-BSD version 1.4 (Da Vinci Edition). In January 2008, iXsystems entered into a similar agreement with Micro Center.

On September 1, 2016, the PC-BSD team announced that the name of the operating system would change to TrueOS. Along with the rebranding, the project also became a rolling release distribution, based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT branch.

On November 15, 2016, TrueOS began the transition from FreeBSD's rc.d to OpenRC as the default init system. Apart from Gentoo/Alt, where OpenRC was initially developed, this is the only other major BSD based operating system using OpenRC.

In July 2018, TrueOS announced that they would spin off the desktop edition into a separate project named Project Trident.

Development of TrueOS ended in 2020 and the developers recommended users move to other BSD-based operating systems.

Release history

Version Release date FreeBSD codebase1.0Personal Computing - BSD style | Tux MachinesApril 29, 20066.01.1May 29, 20066.11.2July 12, 20066.11.324-hour test drive: PC-BSD | Ars TechnicaDecember 31, 20066.11.4DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 222, 1 October 2007September 24, 20076.2-STABLE1.4.1.xVarious6.3-PRERELEASE1.5DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 244, 17 March 2008March 12, 20086.3-STABLE1.5.1April 23, 20086.3-STABLE7.0Review: PC-BSD 7September 16, 20087.0-STABLE7.0.1October 17, 20087.0-STABLE7.0.2December 10, 20087.1-PRERELEASE7.1DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 298, 13 April 2009PC-BSD 7.1 Galileo - ReviewApril 10, 20097.2-PRERELEASE7.1.1July 6, 20097.2-STABLE8.0DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 344, 8 March 2010PC-BSD 8 review | LinuxBSDos.comFebruary 23, 20108.0-RELEASE-P28.1PC-BSD 8.1 review | LinuxBSDos.comJuly 21, 20108.1-RELEASE8.2PC-BSD 8.2 review | LinuxBSDos.comFebruary 24, 20118.29.0PC-BSD 9.0 Isotope - RadioactiveDistroWatch Weekly, Issue 441, 30 January 2012January 13, 20129.09.1DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 489, 7 January 2013December 18, 20129.19.2DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 531, 28 October 2013October 7, 20139.2-CURRENT10.0DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 579, 6 October 2014PC-BSD 10.0 Joule review - TroublesomeJanuary 29, 201410.010.1DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 588, 8 December 2014November 14, 201410.110.2August 21, 201510.210.3April 4, 201610.3TrueOS 11.0September 1, 2016FreeBSD-CURRENT TrueOS 2017-02-22TrueOS Stable update released 2/22/17 - TrueOSDistroWatch Weekly, Issue 710, 1 May 2017 February 22, 2017 FreeBSD-CURRENT TrueOS 2017-06-01TrueOS STABLE Update: June 2, 2017 June 2, 2017 FreeBSD-CURRENT TrueOS 17.12TrueOS 17.12 Release - TrueOS December 14, 2017 FreeBSD-CURRENT TrueOS 18.03TrueOS STABLE 18.03 Release - TrueOSDistroWatch Weekly, Issue 762, 7 May 2018 March 30, 2018 FreeBSD-CURRENT

Since version 7, PC-BSD began following the same numbering system as FreeBSD.

Since version 9.0, the KDE SC, customized to support tighter application integration and the .txz package management system, was no longer the only desktop environment supported by PC-BSD. While manual installation of other desktops such as Xfce and GNOME had been technically possible in earlier releases, none of these were supported in the earlier versions, and major functionality was lost when not using PC-BSD's special build of KDE SC. Starting with version 9.0, PC-BSD added other desktop environments, including GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE.

PC-BSD used to support both amd64 and i686 architectures. Support for i686 was dropped in version 9.2.Minimum hardware requirements for PC-BSD 9.1Minimum hardware requirements for PC-BSD 9.2

Starting in September 2016 with the rebranding of PC-BSD, TrueOS became a rolling release distribution based on FreeBSD's current branch.

Package management TrueOS's package manager takes a similar approach to installing software to many other Unix-like operating systems. Instead of using the FreeBSD Ports tree directly (although it remains available), TrueOS uses files with the .txz filename extension packages which contain compiled ports. An autobuild system tracked the FreeBSD ports collection and generated new .txz files daily.

The TrueOS package management system aims to be visually similar to that of major operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, where applications are installed from a single download link with graphical prompts, while maintaining internally the traditional .txz package management systems that many Unix-like systems use.Introduction The TrueOS package manager also takes care of creating categorized links in the KDE menu and on the KDE SC desktop.

Lumina Desktop In 2014, the PC-BSD project announced its development of a new desktop environment, from scratch, named Lumina. Ken Moore is the main developer of Lumina, which is based on the Qt toolkit.

As of July 2016, Lumina has its own web site.

The desktop environment is not an application development toolkit, and aims to be a graphical interface that only uses plugins for customization.

License TrueOS was originally licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) because the developers were under the impression that applications using the Qt, which TrueOS uses for its interface development, must be licensed under the GPL or the Q Public License. Upon discovering that there was, in fact, no such restriction, the TrueOS developers later relicensed the code under a BSD-like 3-clause license.

TrueOS and the TrueOS logo are registered trademarks of iXsystems Inc.

Hardware requirements The New York City *BSD User Group runs a service named dmesgd,dmesgd which provides user-submitted dmesg information for different computer hardware (laptops, workstations, single-board computers, embedded systems, virtual machines, etc.) capable of running TrueOS.

According to the TrueOS wiki, TrueOS has the following hardware requirements:

Minimum amd64 processor 1 GiB of RAM 20 GiB free hard drive space Network card

Recommended amd64 processor EFI system partition for installation of rEFInd 4 GiB of RAM 30 GiB of free hard drive space on a primary partition for a desktop installation, or 20 GiB for a server installation 50 GiB is recommended for installations with backup services 3D accelerated video card Network card Sound card

UEFI UEFI support (for amd64 only) has been added to the installer and the boot manager since version 10.1 with the default EFI boot manager to be rEFInd. This includes ACPI detection and setup of Root System Description Pointer (RSDP),RSDP eXtended System Descriptor Table (XSDT),XSDT and Root System Description Table (RSDT)RSDT pass-through values to the kernel. A new installation is needed in order to install UEFI support as it requires the creation of a small FAT partition. The current UEFI does not support secure boot.

Gallery

TrueOS

Bron en licentie