Bordeaux is looking for PC-BSD and FreeBSD testers who are willing to write a review. From the Bordeaux website:
The Bordeaux Technology Group is a software services and development company specializing in Windows compatibility software. Users of Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris and Mac OSX systems from time to time find themselves in the need to run specialized Windows software.
John has been working on enhancements to the backend of pc-sysinstaller. He describes his progress so far and brainstorms possible future features with Will Backman on today’s issue of BSDTalk. John hopes to have testing snapshots that include his changes in time for MeetBSD in early November and we’ll announce them here when they are available so you can
The PC-BSD translation team uses Pootle to manage its translations. Josh has just finished a test upgrade to Pootle and is looking for testers’ feedback before initiating the actual migration:
I have a new version of pootle and translate toolkit up. There were some issues with the migration, some of the strings were mangled in the database, I think this
Yesterday Kris uploaded the PC-BSD update that addresses a recent security issue detailed in this FreeBSD Security Advisory.
To apply the update on your PC-BSD system, use the Online Update Utility, then reboot for the fix to take effect.
LXDE is the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment and will be one of the window managers available for selection during a PC-BSD 9.0 install. You can see screenshots at this page of the LXDE website.
The existing FreeBSD port was quite out of date so Kris spent some time last week updating the port and adding some missing components. Since LXDE
The PC-BSD Users Handbook has been divided into sections and each page now allows navigation to the previous and next pages as well as back to the Table of Contents. This restructuring is more user-friendly; it also allows Handbook contributors to more easily see which content needs updating.
The goal is to have the Handbook complete by end of year
Several members of the PC-BSD team will be at EuroBSDCon later this week. Kris Moore will be speaking; his presentation is entitled PC-SYSINSTALL — A new installer backend for PC-BSD & FreeBSD. We will also be giving out DVDs of PC-BSD 8.1 in the booth area of the conference. Hope to see some of you there!
The following PBI is now available in Software Manager:
Aria2: has a segmented downloading engine in its core. Therefore, it can download files a lot faster than ordinary browsers.
This was a much requested PBI; thanks to Jesse Smith for creating it.
Speaking of much requested PBIs, a bug was found in the recently released Chromium PBI. The buggy version
The following PBI is now available in Software Manager:
RAWstudio: an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. Rawstudio will convert your RAW files into JPEG, PNG or TIF images which you can then print or send to friends and clients. It has a graphical user interface, so you can simply open a RAW file
Two new PBIs are now available in Software Manager:
Chromium: an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web.
Emc2: a portable, interactive, graphical editor of two-dimensional mesh geometries. It can create and modify geometries (as in CAD), and define line discretizations, subdomains, and reference numbers
Jesse Smith, an active PC-BSD user and creator of many PBIs, is working on a program that automates parts of the FreeBSD port to an 8.x PBI conversion process. If you would like to try his command line utility, check out his Make-A-PBI Sourceforge page. He’s open to feedback, bug reports, and patches–see the contact information at that website if
For those of you interested in testing BBB (an open source VoIP web conferencing system similar to commercial applications such as Webex), I’ve written a how-to on setting it up on a FreeBSD or PC-BSD 8.1 system. When I get a chance, I’ll test it with webcamd and desktop sharing. Once better tested, we’ll see what we can do about
We’re starting to fill in the TODO list for PC-BSD 9.0 and you can view the list here. As items are marked as DONE, we’ll note them on the blog.
Two items were recently completed by Kris and he has hyperlinked their associated “DONE” with their location in the code repository.
The first is to modify the installer to
Late last week, Kris commited the PBI command line utilities that will go into 9.0. This post contains instructions for those who wish to give the commands a try (they work on 8.x) and how you can help with documentation, usage examples, and feature suggestions. If you like using Software Manager, don’t worry as that will still be in 9–these
One of the new features coming in 9.0 is the ability to select and run multiple window managers, meaning you no longer have to like KDE to like PC-BSD 
We do realize that we’re opening up a can of worms in that we’ll be discovering lots of bugs in various window managers and/or their FreeBSD implementation. This can be seen
We did some testing on 3G modems at OLF and loading the u3g driver seems to do the trick (earlier versions of FreeBSD had a conflict between u3g and umass but this seems to be fixed now). You can load the driver by issuing this command as the superuser:
kldload u3g
If you would like the driver to autoload at
One of the changes coming in 9.0 is the ability to select multiple desktop environments during installation. Kris completed the code for this late last week and was able to show it off at the PC-BSD booth during Ohio LinuxFest. Here is a preliminary screenshot:
In order to fully integrate the PC-BSD utilities into a desktop manager, the desktop manager
Earlier today, Karl Fischer mentioned that Tapatalk might be a useful forum feature. As described on its website, Tapatalk “is a forum app on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia. Our app provides you super fast forum access to any vBulletin, IPBoard, phpBB or SMF forum that has activated our Tapatalk plugin”.
The forum system administrator added the plugin
The following PBIs are now available in Software Manager:
The latest NVIDIA driver is now available through Update Manager for both 32 and 64 bit systems. From the release highlights:
