PC-BSD the desktop distro version of FreeBSD, is now out with its 7.1 ‘Galileo’ release. It’s one of the most exciting releases of PC-BSD since 2006 when I first started writing (and using) PC-BSD.
The new release is built from FreeBSD 7.2 which just hit beta last week, and uses KDE 4.2.2 as its desktop.
This release has a few incremental improvements including an improved installer, package management, Wi-Fi and networking tools.
There is however at least one feature in PC-BSD 7.2 that I haven’t seen before. Galileo includes something called ‘Warden’ which is a utility for FreeBSD server setup. More specifically it can be used as a graphical front end for virtualized FreeBSD instances — or jails.
According to iXysystems (which since 2006 has ‘owned’ PC-BSD), “The Warden makes jail creation and management accessible to a greater number of users, and provides a secure and isolated environment for all sorts of uses, such as a mail server, database server, or webserver, to name a few. Warden configurations, called Inmates, can be used to instantly load pre-configured jails into the Warden.”
That’s pretty neat in my opinion and could be the use case that helps to but PC-BSD
7.2 on more enterprise desktops as an admin tool for FreeBSD servers.
With the incremental improvements to existing features, it all amounts to a solid and easier to use version of PC-BSD than past versions. It’s part of a trend that I’ve seen consistently building with PC-BSD since at least the 1.5 release.
