TrueOS 2017-02-22 TrueOS, which was formerly named PC-BSD, is a FreeBSD-based operating system. TrueOS is a rolling release platform which is based on FreeBSD's "CURRENT" branch, providing TrueOS with the latest drivers and features from FreeBSD. Apart from the name change, TrueOS has deviated from the old PC-BSD project in a number of ways. The system installer is now more streamlined (and I will touch on that later) and TrueOS is a rolling release platform while PC-BSD defaulted to point releases. Another change is PC-BSD used to allow the user to customize which software was installed at boot time, including the desktop environment. The TrueOS project now selects a minimal amount of software for the user and defaults to using the Lumina desktop environment.



Not everything has changed. TrueOS still features many of the same utilities PC-BSD offered, including encrypted removable media, like USB thumb drives, as well as ZFS boot environments. The project, under the new name, still supplies two editions we can download: a Desktop edition and a Server edition. Both editions run on 64-bit x86 computers exclusively. I will be focusing on TrueOS's Desktop offering in this review. The Desktop edition is available through a 2.3GB download. Unlike most Linux distributions, TrueOS offers different downloads depending on whether we intend to copy the installation image to USB or DVD media.



Installing



Booting from the TrueOS media brings up a text menu where we are asked if we would like to launch the system installer in graphical mode, graphical mode using a specific driver or launch a text-based installer. Taking the graphical option runs the system installer. The installer presents us with simple prompts or questions in the middle of the screen. Along the bottom of the display are buttons for opening utilities. For example, there is a hardware compatibility checker which will look over our system and report which devices are detected and have working device drivers. This lets us check our hardware's compatibility with TrueOS before we begin the installation process. Another module opens an on-screen keyboard and another button opens a virtual terminal window. There are two more buttons, one launches a disk manager and the last one offers to configure network settings.



Most of the installer tools worked for me. I especially liked having easy access to hardware compatibility information. The network module would launch, but I could not get the system to connect to my network, whether I used dynamic or static networking options. This problem only posed an issue during the installation process, TrueOS automatically connected to my network once the operating system had been installed. Clicking the disk manager button did not do anything, the disk manager tool would not open.



TrueOS's installer gets us to select our preferred language from a list. We are then asked if we would like to install TrueOS as a server or desktop system. We also have the option of restoring a past copy of the operating system from a Life Preserver backup and I will talk about Life Preserver later. We are then asked if we would like to use the BSD or GRUB boot loader and we are given a chance to customize disk usage. TrueOS uses ZFS as its file system and will take over a given partition or hard drive, turning the device into a ZFS storage pool. We can customize the ZFS settings if we like, but I found the installer provided reasonable defaults. The installer then copies its files to the hard drive and offers to reboot the computer.



First impressions



The first time TrueOS boots, the system runs a graphical wizard which asks us a few configuration questions. We are asked to select our preferred language from a list, choose our time zone and create a password for the root account. We are then asked to create a user account for ourselves. Next we are given a chance to test the audio output of our sound devices. The next screen gives us the chance to enable or disable certain features, including IPv6 support, a secure shell server and Realtek wireless driver support. With these steps completed, the configuration wizard disappears and we are presented with a graphical login screen. From here we can sign into our account and begin exploring the Lumina desktop environment. As the Lumina desktop runs on top of the Fluxbox window manager, we also have the option of signing into a bare bones Fluxbox graphical interface, but most people will probably prefer to use the full featured Lumina environment.





TrueOS 2017-02-22 -- The Lumina desktop and application menu

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Lumina is arranged with the desktop panel placed at the bottom of the display. The panel hosts the application menu, task switcher and system tray. In the system tray we find a few icons, one controls the audio volume and another launches the operating system's settings panel. A widget in the lower-right corner of the screen displays news items collected from the TrueOS, Lumina and FreeBSD websites.



The application menu takes an unusual approach to displaying items, making use of a single column of launchers. At first we are shown a list of favourite applications and places. We can then click buttons on the menu to browse all available applications. This shows us a list of desktop programs, listed alphabetically without category separators. If we wish to split applications into separate categories there is a toggle box we can click to place applications in category sub-menus. I struggled adapting to this method of organizing application launchers. I have used past versions of Lumina and have found the menu always puts a lot of focus on getting the user to move commonly used items into the Favourites menu. This takes a little while to set up and seems to assume the user will not use many applications (more than around six or seven). If we use more programs than that, we end up digging through the Favourites menu as it becomes almost as unwieldy as the unorganized application launchers. Alternatively, we can place program launchers on the desktop and this may be an easier approach as newly installed desktop applications automatically put icons on the Lumina desktop.



Another feature of the Lumina desktop I noticed early on was the theme tends to place black or white text on a grey background. This worked fairly well in the application menu, but it made it impossible for me to read text in the title bars of application windows. The window theme can be adjusted in the Lumina settings panel which I will touch on later.



Hardware



I explored using TrueOS in two test environments, a desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. When running in VirtualBox, TrueOS booted fairly quickly, probably about twice as quickly as PC-BSD 10 did in the same environment. I believe this change is due to TrueOS switching to using OpenRC for managing services. Once TrueOS booted and I got signed into Lumina, the graphical interface was sluggish. I noticed TrueOS generally used about 20% of my host computer's CPU even when TrueOS was sitting idle at the desktop. I eventually found the poor performance was due to the Compton compositor. Compton can be disabled in Lumina's settings panel under the Window Effects module. Once Compton was disabled, desktop performance improved and CPU usage was reduced by more than half. I had hoped to remove Compton from the system entirely, but the package appears to be a dependency of Lumina and removing the compositor would result in removing the Lumina desktop as well.



When running TrueOS on the desktop computer, I ran into a number of problems. The first was that TrueOS would only boot in UEFI mode, the operating system could not boot on my desktop computer when running in Legacy BIOS mode. When booting from the installation media, TrueOS failed to start unless I selected the safe mode settings option with the vesa video driver from the boot menu. Once I got TrueOS to boot, trying to launch the graphical system installer would cause the system to crash unless I forced the use of the vesa driver for running the installer. With these hurdles cleared, I was able to install and use TrueOS, but my desktop computer's display was stuck at a low resolution.



Other features of the operating system worked well. Audio functioned out of the box and networking was set up automatically. I ran into a problem trying to set up my printer. TrueOS ships with a CUPS web interface which could not detect my HP printer. Later in the week I installed the system-config-printer software which acts as a friendly front-end to the CUPS printing software. The system-config-printer program, once installed, failed to launch due to missing dependencies.



TrueOS generally used around 240MB of active memory and about 290MB of wired memory, for a total of 530MB when signed into Lumina.



Software management



To keep up with new features and security fixes we can access the Update Manager which is available from TrueOS's control centre. The update utility is a graphical application featuring four tabs. The first tab, Updates, shows currently available package updates. The second tab, Branches, appears to not do anything as I was unable to select it. The third tab, Settings, lets us enable boot environments to take snapshots of the operating system and schedule automatic reboots. We can also select which software repository to use with options including Stable, Unstable and Custom. The default repository is Stable. The final tab, Recent Updates, shows a list of packages we have installed recently.



During the time I was running TrueOS there were no updates available through the default, Stable, repository. This surprised me as the ISO I had downloaded for TrueOS was over a month old. I found there were many updates available in the Unstable repository and I will come back to my experiment with the Unstable repository toward the end of this review.



On TrueOS's parent, FreeBSD, there is a command line package manager called pkg. While this tool is available to TrueOS users, its use is not recommended. Running the pkg tool displays a message recommending we use TrueOS's own package management utilities like pc-updatemanager. We can also use a desktop software manager called AppCafe.



The AppCafe package manager can be accessed through the application menu or TrueOS's settings panel. The application features three tabs: Browse, Installed and Pending. The Browse tab shows us categories of available applications and clicking on a category shows us a list of packages. Each package is shown with its name, a single line description and a download button. We can click on a package's listing to see more details about the selected software. Clicking a package's install button causes the item to be downloaded in the background and we can monitor the installation process in the Pending tab. The middle tab, Installed, shows an alphabetical list of packages currently on the system. We can select items to remove and packages are quietly deleted in the background. While the Pending tab can show us actions taking place in the background, I could not find a way to pause or cancel actions already queued or in progress.





TrueOS 2017-02-22 -- The AppCafe software manager

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Applications



The operating system does not ship with many packages in the default installation, but we are given some popular items. Firefox is installed for us. Flash is not included by default, but Adobe Flash and the free software Gnash implementation of Flash are available in the software repository. Adobe's Flash did not work when I tried installing it, but Gnash did and proved capable. TrueOS also ships with the Thunderbird e-mail application and the X11VNC desktop sharing software. The VLC multimedia player is included in TrueOS along with codecs for playing most media formats. We can find a PDF viewer, the Phototonic image viewer and the Insight file manager in the application menu. There are also small utilities, including a calculator, disk manager and text editor. The CUPS printing software and web-admin panel for managing printers are featured too. In the background TrueOS runs on the FreeBSD 12.0 kernel which is, at the time of writing, in FreeBSD's CURRENT development branch.



I ran into a problem when running TrueOS's default terminal emulator, QTerminal. The QTerminal window always appeared to the left side of the desktop and could not be moved. It also covered any other windows trying to occupy the same space, effectively occupying the "top" desktop layer. I could not resize the QTerminal window. The xterm terminal emulator worked without any problems and soon became my default virtual terminal.



Most of the applications I installed in order to accomplish tasks worked as expected. One of the few exceptions was Chromium. When the Chromium web browser was launched its window was invisible, but was placed over top other windows. This meant that, until I killed the Chromium process, I could see the other windows on my desktop, but not access them as Chromium was placed on top of the other windows.



Settings



TrueOS ships with two configuration panels. The first one is called Control Panel and includes modules for managing the underlying operating system. From Control Panel we can launch the AppCafe and Update Manager. There is a tool for creating, renaming and deleting boot environments. Boot environments are snapshots of the operating system we can switch to when a configuration change or update breaks the system. There are also modules for configuring the firewall, enabling or disabling background services, managing user accounts and there is a process monitor. These tools generally worked well for me. I like that the firewall module allows us to open network ports based on the name of a service, selected from a drop-down list, as well as by a numeric port. I found the process monitor to be a bit limited as it seems we cannot sort the list of processes by different fields, but otherwise the monitor worked well.





TrueOS 2017-02-22 -- The Control Panel

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The second configuration panel, called Desktop Settings, handles the look and feel of the Lumina desktop. The Desktop Settings panel includes friendly modules for changing the interface's theme, enabling or disabling compositing, setting up keyboard short-cuts and auto-starting programs when we login. The settings panel also helps us change the wallpaper, adjust the desktop's resolution and configure the screen saver.





TrueOS 2017-02-22 -- Lumina's settings panel

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One other tool I would like to mention is Life Preserver. This is a utility for managing file system snapshots and backups. The application is split into four tabs. The Snapshots tab handles creating or deleting ZFS snapshots of our data. The Replication tab handles transferring existing snapshots to another computer. A third tab, called Schedule, sets up periodic backups. The fourth tab, Settings, enables telling us via an e-mail when the hard drive begins to get full. Life Preserver, despite its simple interface, is a very powerful tool. Through it we can create regular snapshots of our data and operating system and transfer these snapshots to a remote computer, greatly increasing the safety of our information.



Running Unstable



Earlier I mentioned the Stable repository of TrueOS had no software updates and I became curious as to how well the system would work if I switched to the Unstable software repository. This also gave me an opportunity to properly test boot environments to see if they would roll back the operating system to a previous snapshot. I created a new boot environment, went into Update Manager and switched over to the Unstable branch. The update utility found hundreds of new package updates and offered to install them for me, which I accepted. Once the new packages had been downloaded, I was informed the update could not be completed until I had restarted TrueOS. When I rebooted the computer, the system asked if it was okay to install the new updates and I again accepted. The system then paused to install the updates, which took quite a long time, nearly half an hour. Then, once it was finished, the system rebooted and I was brought back to a graphical login screen.





TrueOS 2017-02-22 -- Managing boot environments

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For the most part the update process worked successfully, despite the long wait during the reboot. I found myself using newer versions of programs and the system continued to work. I did run into two problems following the update. One was the application menu's background went from a soft grey to solid white, making the application menu a little harder to look at. I also found my desktop's resolution had been reduced. I then tested rolling back to a previous boot environment. This just required me to select the snapshot I had made in the Control Panel and reboot. When TrueOS came back on-line I had my old software back, my screen was back to its full resolution and I was once again using the Stable software repository. In short, boot environments worked well and as intended, saving me from ill-advised configuration changes.



Conclusions



What I took away from my time with TrueOS is that the project is different in a lot of ways from PC-BSD. Much more than just the name has changed. The system is now more focused on cutting edge software and features in FreeBSD's development branch. The install process has been streamlined and the user begins with a set of default software rather than selecting desired packages during the initial setup. The configuration tools, particularly the Control Panel and AppCafe, have changed a lot in the past year. The designs have a more flat, minimal look. It used to be that PC-BSD did not have a default desktop exactly, but there tended to be a focus on KDE. With TrueOS the project's in-house desktop, Lumina, serves as the default environment and I think it holds up fairly well.



One new service I found interesting, but did not get a chance to play with this week was SysAdm, a remote administration tool for managing multiple systems. SysAdm is installed on TrueOS by default and should make running multiple TrueOS (or FreeBSD) systems easier for administrators.



The desktop experience TrueOS offers is a bit mixed. On the one hand I enjoyed the configuration tools, the relatively light memory footprint and the great ZFS features, like snapshots. I also think that SysAdm looks promising as a way to remotely manage computers through a point-n-click interface. On the other hand, I ran into a few problems with TrueOS. The lack of security updates in the Stable repository worried me a bit and I think the Unstable branch might move faster than most people would like. Hardware proved a bit of an issue with both my desktop computer and printer, providing serious hurdles to working with TrueOS. The operating system worked well in a virtual machine though, so my issues may have been hardware specific.



In all, I think TrueOS offers a convenient way to experiment with new FreeBSD technologies and ZFS. I also think people who want to run FreeBSD on a desktop computer may want to look at TrueOS as it sets up a graphical environment automatically. However, people who want a stable desktop platform with lots of applications available out of the box may not find what they want with this project. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



TrueOS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 4.8/10 from 70 review(s).

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