GhostBSD 18.10 - Changing the base GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented member of of the BSD family. Past versions of GhostBSD were based directly on stable releases of FreeBSD and typically offered multiple desktop editions featuring the MATE and Xfce desktop environments. The latest version of GhostBSD, 18.10, shifts its base to TrueOS. TrueOS is itself based upon FreeBSD's development (-CURRENT) branch, making running GhostBSD roughly similar to running a FreeBSD development snapshot, though the two may not be binary compatible. This arrangement gives the operating system access to the latest FreeBSD drivers and features. GhostBSD 18.10 ships one edition featuring the MATE desktop.



Along with the change in its base, GhostBSD switches to the OpenRC service manager and swaps out OpenSSL in favour of LibreSSL in the base operating system. The latest download for GhostBSD is 2.5GB in size. Booting from the live media brings up the MATE desktop with a two-panel layout. The Applications, Places & System menus are placed in the upper-left corner of the desktop while the system tray occupies the upper-right. The second panel is home to the task switcher at the bottom of the screen. On the desktop we find icons for opening the Caja file manager, the system installer and the HexChat IRC client. Opening the IRC client automatically connects us with the GhostBSD support chat room.



System installer



GhostBSD's system installer is a graphical application which I feel bears a resemblance to Calamares. The installer walks us through selecting our preferred language, our time zone and keyboard layout from lists. When it comes to disk partitioning we are given three general options: using UFS on the whole disk, manual disk partitioning with UFS, and setting up a full disk ZFS volume. I opted to experiment with the ZFS option. When using ZFS we just need to select which disk(s) to use and how large our swap space should be. We are then asked to create a password for the root account and make up an account username & password for ourselves. The account creation screen allows us to select our preferred shell, with options including sh, csh, tcsh, bash, fish, ksh and zsh. The installer then copies its files to the hard drive and offers to restart the computer.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- The system installer

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Early impressions



The freshly installed GhostBSD boots to a graphical login screen. Here we can enter our username and password to sign into the MATE desktop. There is a message on the login screen letting us know we can switch session options by pressing F1, but without any alternative desktops installed, nothing happens when tapping F1.



GhostBSD runs the MATE 1.20.3 desktop and my first impressions of the desktop were positive. There were no pop-ups, no welcome window and very little in the way of visual effects. The interface was responsive and uncluttered. The default theme uses a pleasantly high-contrast approach and text is usually displayed as white-on-black or black-on-white.



Hardware



I experimented with GhostBSD in two test environments. When running in VirtualBox, the operating system booted and ran well. The desktop was able to dynamically resize and use my host computer's full screen resolution. GhostBSD does not allow for mouse integration, so the mouse pointer gets "trapped" inside the virtual machine's window. Another issue I had with the mouse was, in the virtual machine, the mouse was super sensitive and would zoom across the MATE desktop with very little encouragement. I was able to change this in the MATE mouse settings by setting pointer acceleration to its lowest setting and sensitivity to the highest. (By default, both options are set to their lowest level.)





GhostBSD 18.10 -- Exploring the MATE desktop

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When running GhostBSD on my desktop computer, I found the operating system performed well. This was a pleasant surprise as, in the past eight years, I don't think I have ever had a member of the FreeBSD, TrueOS & GhostBSD family both boot on my workstation and support my monitor's full resolution. Some past versions would boot, but with unusually low screen resolutions, most failed to boot at all with the default settings. GhostBSD broke this tread, running smoothly, working well with my video card and offering a pleasantly responsive desktop interface. The mouse pointer even behaved itself when running on physical hardware.



A fresh install of GhostBSD takes up about 3.8GB of disk space. When signed into the MATE desktop I found the operating system used about 310MB of active memory and 636MB of wired memory, including space set aside for ZFS. The operating system tended to use very little of my CPU, or my host computer's resources when running in a virtual machine.



The only hardware issue I encountered came when I tried to add a CUPS virtual PDF printer, a method used to turn documents into PDF files. After I had installed the cups-pdf package, I went into the printer manager. Creating a PDF virtual printer was an option and highlighted as the default action, which looked to be a good omen. However, selecting the PDF printer and clicking Next took me to a screen for installing the driver and, on this screen, all the buttons were disabled. I could not select a driver or proceed to the next step, I could only go back to the previous screen. So I had to get by without the PDF printer.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- Trying to set up a virtual printer

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Applications



GhostBSD ships with a pretty standard collection of software. Looking through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser, LibreOffice, the HexChat IRC client, the Pidgin messaging software, Thunderbird for handing e-mail and the Transmission bittorrent software. The Atril document viewer, a dictionary and the Cheese webcam utility are installed too. The operating system offers a full range of media codecs along with the Exaile audio player and MPlayer media player. Xfburn is included to help us burn optical discs.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- Running LibreOffice and the Pluma text editor

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There is a menu entry called GhostBSD Bugs which opens Firefox and navigates to the project's issue tracker. The Caja file manager is present and I found it worked well for me. There is a system monitor, the Eye of MATE image viewer and the Shotwell photo manager. A text editor, archive manager and calculator are provided. Though not enabled by default, GhostBSD ships with the Plank desktop dock, which offers a macOS-style dock at the bottom of the screen.



In the background, the operating system ships with the usual collection of BSD command line utilities and manual pages. The Clang compiler is installed by default and the system runs on FreeBSD's 12.0 kernel.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- The default media players

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Software management



GhostBSD offered a few different tools for handling software. The first one I discovered was the update manager, which can be found in the System menu and in the settings panel. I did not get a chance to see it in action though as the update manager consistently reported there were no new packages to download during my trial.



The second graphical package utility is OctoPkg. This tool is in the Applications menu and is roughly divided into two panes. The top pane displays packages that are either installed or available while the bottom pane displays tabs of information. The bottom pane can show us project-related news, information on a selected package and progress information.



An unusual aspect of OctoPkg is that the top pane toggles between showing us installed packages or available ones (it does not show both at the same time). Further, by default no packages are shown when the Available button is toggled. The display is empty until we type a search for packages. We can find items by name or, sometimes, using a simple description.



Once we locate the items we want, we can click a button to queue a package for installation. Once we have selected all the software we want, OctoPkg will download the desired software in one big batch and install it. GhostBSD has a repository of over 32,000 packages and most open source software we are likely to want is available. For added flexibility we can use the FreeBSD ports collection and install new software from its source code.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- The OctoPkg package manager

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Finally, GhostBSD ships with the FreeBSD pkg command line package manager. This utility is fast, has simple output and I find it pleasantly easy to use. The pkg command pulls in packages from TrueOS and GhostBSD repositories.



Unlike past versions of GhostBSD (and FreeBSD), the current version treats core operating system components as packages which can be managed by pkg. Past versions kept the core system separate and managed updates with the freebsd-update utility. Now things have been merged and simplified so all system upgrades can be handled by one package manager.



Settings



The operating system includes a settings panel with a pretty standard set of modules for adjusting the appearance of the MATE desktop. There is a notable lack of tools for managing the lower level parts of the operating system (such as the firewall and administrator authentication), but there are plenty of tools for tweaking the desktop.



Generally, the settings modules worked well. For instance, the screen saver kept coming on too frequently for my taste and it took just a few clicks to fix this. There is an option to switch window buttons from the right to left side of applications and this worked, though it had a side effect: the Applications menu disappeared and I had to logout and sign back in to get the menu back.



When the user signs in the system plays a sound and I had assumed I could turn this feature off under the Sounds module. Instead I found the login audio clip under the Start-up Applications module. The search for this option reminded me that everything is easy to find once you know where to look.





GhostBSD 18.10 -- Desktop settings

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Other observations



GhostBSD enables several different ways to perform administrator tasks. We can sign in directly as the root user (or use su) to switch to the root account. The first user we create can also use sudo to perform administrative actions. An alternative to sudo, called doas, is increasingly popular in the BSD communities and it is enabled by default too. The doas tool has several entries in its configuration file which allow members of the wheel group (which includes the first user account we create) to perform several tasks without providing a password. This allows our account to adjust network settings, install updates and lock packages without entering our password. Personally, this approach is more convenient (and less secure) than I'd like and I opted to remove these extra lines from the doas configuration, but I can see the appeal for users who want to quickly perform common functions without the hassle of entering their password.



I think boot environments deserve a special mention. When we set up GhostBSD on a ZFS volume it enables us to create file system snapshots and boot environments. A boot environment is a file system level snapshot of our operating system. Using a tool called beadm we can create snapshots whenever we are about to update the operating system or make a configuration change. Then, if anything goes wrong, we can simply restart the computer and select an existing snapshot from the boot menu. This not only allows us to undo mistakes, but means GhostBSD can survive almost any software error or broken upgrade.



One boot environment feature I especially liked is that when we boot into an older snapshot the last active snapshot (the default one) is automatically mounted under the /mnt directory. This allows us to quickly compare a snapshot to the broken environment, restore missing files or copying over configuration files we know worked in the past.



Conclusions



I was tentatively optimistic going into my experiment with GhostBSD. The shift from a stable FreeBSD base to a rolling TrueOS base was one which I had hoped would bring new features and hardware support, but I was also concerned the result might be rough around the edges. For the most part I was pleased with what GhostBSD 18.10 provided. In my opinion the MATE desktop performs well and looks good. One minor glitch aside, I had no complaints with the desktop experience.



I was very happy to find that GhostBSD would work with my desktop computer, a rare event for me when using FreeBSD or TrueOS. I'm hopeful this means future versions of FreeBSD will also work with this hardware. The only issue I ran into concerning hardware was GhostBSD was unable to work with a wireless network card I plugged into the machine during my trial.



I liked the default applications GhostBSD shipped with. The software included is mostly similar to what we would find in a mainstream Linux distribution and most of the extra applications I wanted could be found through the package manager. Speaking of package management, I think OctoPkg is capable, but not particularly user friendly. Even as a low level package manager, it takes some getting used to, compared to Muon or Synaptic. OctoPkg works, but I'm hoping future versions of GhostBSD are able to adopt a more beginner friendly software manager.



Unlike past versions of GhostBSD (and FreeBSD), this release unites managing the core operating system and third-party packages under one package manager. This is likely to be convenient for users as they no longer need to switch between pkg and freebsd-update to get all their security fixes. However, I think it is too soon to tell if this change brings any problems with it. I am curious to see how well upgrading end user applications mixes with core system security fixes. I am also curious to see how GhostBSD will handle future versions based on TrueOS's rolling release platform.



On the whole, I think GhostBSD is about as easy as it gets when setting up a BSD-based desktop system. Its installer is easy to use, the desktop is pre-configured, there are a small amount of useful applications available out of the box. It's a very positive experience, in my opinion. One of the few problems I think Linux users may face when trying GhostBSD is the lack of certain closed-source applications such as Steam and the Chrome web browser. These are not available on GhostBSD. For people who stick with open source applications, GhostBSD will probably provide everything they need, but people who want to watch Netflix or play big name games, this system may not be able to deliver those experiences. These restrictions aside, I'm very pleased with GhostBSD's latest offering and think it is a pleasant way to get the FreeBSD experience with a quick and easy set up process. * * * * * 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



GhostBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 6.9/10 from 58 review(s).

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