FreeSBIE 1.1: A FreeBSD Live CD

I think I'm addicted to live CDs... I've tried several recently, all Linux versions. Then I saw this article on NewsForge about a Italian programming contest in which a FreeBSD live CD won the award for "Best User Interaction". It was called FreeSBIE. Of course I had to download it...

I had installed FreeBSD on on of my hard drives before and thought it was okay but didn't take a lot of time to mess with it. This live CD though... I really like it. When you boot you're given the option of a normal boot, single user mode etc. Then you are also asked for your desired language and keyboard layout (I chose "Traditional Unix Workstation" under the USA section). You can also choose between a tcshell session, Fluxbox, Xfce or the installer which will install FreeSBIE to your HD. I haven't tried that yet.

I loaded both Fluxbox and Xfce (at different times of course) and found them both pretty smooth. You've got Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird to work with as well as Gaim, XChat OpenOffice, Ethereal, The GIMP, etc. Firefox looks really cool in Fluxbox...

There are also system status indicators on the desktop showing RAM and CPU usage as well as system uptime.

You can read more about FreeSBIE in the documentation right here. And yeah, this post was put up with Firefox 1.0 on FreeSBIE running Fluxbox...