One Shot Design

Having acquired PC-BSD Software in October 2006, the enterprise-class hardware solution provider iXsystems has now announced the Apollo, a workstation featuring the preinstalled PC-BSD OS.

This new offer reminds me of Zareason, who offers a broad range of hardware with any flavor of Ubuntu GNU/Linux preinstalled: desktops, laptops and servers. I did purchased a workstation from Zareason in Autumn 2008 and found it to run smoothly.

PC-BSD has already been mentionned on this blog. Capitalising on the KDE desctop environment, it is probably one of the most user-friendly UNIXes after Apple Inc. OSX. PD-BSD relies upon Free-BSD, but it also uses its own package management system (PBI) to install applications. There is already quite a broad choice and the list keeps getting longer.

It is nice to see it an OS as promising as PC-BSD running on fully supported hardware.

UNIX Berkeley Software Distributions like PC-BSD were created to make the FreeBSD accessible to the layman. Both PC-BSD and FreeBSD use the ZFS file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system.

Another ZFS-based operating system has just been released: StormOS beta, based on Nexenta, a combination of the OpenSolaris Kernel and Debian code. Unlike PC-BSD, which needs its own installation sources, Nexenta and StormOS can install and run Debian applications.