PC-BSD 9.1 released ahead of FreeBSD 9.1

The developers of PC-BSD have released version 9.1 of their FreeBSD-based Unix distribution for desktop PCs. Version 9.1 of FreeBSD has yet to be officially released, but it appears that the ISO images for the FreeBSD release are queued up on the official server and may just be waiting for an announcement to be made.

The 9.1 release of the FreeBSD family of operating systems has been somewhat delayed; version 9.0 of FreeBSD was released in January 2012 with PC-BSD 9.0, and 9.1 had been expected around the end of summer. Traditional engineering delays are thought to have been to blame, but the recent hacking of two FreeBSD servers cannot have helped.

PC-BSD 9.1 now features TrueOS, a server option for PC-BSD with many of the PC-BSD tools available from the command line. The developers have also introduced a new system installer, which supports ZFS configuration, mirroring, and swap at installation time. The Warden system for managing jails is now fully integrated, and has the ability to create jails and add packages to them from the GUI and can create Linux jails.

There are also new sound configuration and hardware compatibility GUIs along with Bluetooth pairing GUI tools. Creating packages for PC-BSD's PBI (Push Button Installer) package management system has been made easier with a GUI-based EasyPBI utility. AppCafe, the PBI package browser and installer utility, has also been improved.

Other changes include additional support for creating PXE boot servers and for ZFS beadm, improvements in the wireless networking and mirror auto-detection, and bug fixes for PC-BSD-related utilities and empty translation string handling. The users' handbook for PC-BSD is available from the documentation wiki as Epub, HTML or PDF. The BSD-licensed operating system is available to download as 32- or 64-bit versions on DVD images, USB installer images, USB live images, USB "lite" images (with LXDE desktop), or VirtualBox and VMware images.

(djwm)