Hey all,

I was recently made aware of a new distribution of FreeBSD called GhostBSD. One of the focuses of GhostBSD is to provide a FreeBSD-based desktop that uses GNOME.

I’ll be honest, I like KDE over GNOME and probably always will, but my opinion is not your opinion, and I have heard plenty of opinions amongst FreeBSD users that GNOME is preferred by them. So this is going to be a good thing for those of you who prefer GNOME.

They have released their first amd64 version, which I downloaded and installed to my VMWare environment. Here is a screen shot.

See larger image.

I was pleased to find that it was a Live CD, as well, until I realized that it was a Live CD only. There are such a large number of people who have asked about a FreeBSD distro that focus on the desktop using GNOME, that I was actually disappointed to find out that it does not install to the hard drive. However, if this distribution becomes popular, I am sure that the distribution could eventually include an installer.

It downloads and fits on one CD (not DVD) and so the download was rather quick for me.

I installed to my VMWare environment, however, the keyboard didn’t work. Maybe the i386 version would work. It might be worth detecting why this didn’t work and submitting a bug to GhostBSD. It would also be cool if they provided a version that had vmware-tools installed. I am not sure if I could install vmware-tools to a Live CD and if I did, it would probably only be installed until I rebooted.

Great work GhostBSD team. As FreeSBIE is discontinued according to Distrowatch, I will definitely replace my Live CD version of FreeBSD and GhostBSD may be an excellent option.