Throwing in the towel

[David30]

I agree with Graeme's previous post.

How do you expect newcomers to understand highly technical sentences like "enter full pathname of shell or return for /bin/sh"? What is easy for advanced users is impossible for new users to understand in any way!

I will be sticking with PC-BSD, but I won't be using it too often. There are too many little annoyances - which I hope will be fixed as PC-BSD becomes popular. For example, when I first plugged my headphones in, the sound would not work, so I had to Google the problem and put some cryptic commands into the Terminal. Not very user-friendly, but I'm optimistic that PC-BSD will soon automatically switch between sound outputs.

Ubuntu used to have odd and non-user friendly methods, which have slowly improved and I have stuck with Ubuntu. Let's hope PC-BSD can be very easy for everyone to use, including people who know very little about computers. ALWAYS assume that a computer user doesn't know what they're doing, that's the secret.

[fluca1978]

ALWAYS assume that a computer user doesn't know what they're doing, that's the secret.

That is also the reason why I believe that an user brainstorming is a good idea to improve the software. I think pcbsd is suffering the same way did Linux and mainly due to hardware drivers. I don't have a solution right now, but I guess that more users and knowledge base will help the project.

[David30]

I hope the PC-BSD developers are reading these comments. I would love to help-out with ideas. I regularly see how people struggle to use computers. There's a lot of things that so-called "geeks" take for granted, which are too difficult for "newbies" to understand.

Put everything in the GUI. If PC-BSD is encrypted, put lots of line breaks above some simple wording like: "Disk is encrypted for privacy. Please type your password to boot PC-BSD." At the moment, the message showing the disk is encrypted gets hidden somewhere at the top. It's little things like this that confuses new users way too much.

By the way, I am *not* complaining, I'm only pointing out things which confuse users and these things can be easily corrected. I would *love* to see PC-BSD be an alternative to Windows for every user and business with desktop computers.

[milkthistle]

IMO, the biggest hurdle is boot up time. Users are used to quick boot times (10 -15 secs) on both Windows and Linux. I think it's expected now.

[CDN]

I wouldn't ever ever give up on an O/S that looks as clean and organized as PCBSD. I'm saying that notwithstanding I'm having issues creating an shared folder with respect to vboxsf, but so what, I also had issues doing the same maneuver in Linux.

I was onboard Linux Mint back when it was a small community, when I chose it because I couldn't afford software for a commercial application that needed to get done. Not only did it do the job, it did it so well that the client was disbelieving. But, it took a lot lot of time and work.

You want something you have to pay for it, either through cash, or time. If you want to pay cash, get Windows. If you want the luxury of a community and an O/S that's customizable, go with Linux or BSD. And for the record, I'm not a programmer.

[sg1efc]

IMO, the biggest hurdle is boot up time. Users are used to quick boot times (10 -15 secs) on both Windows and Linux. I think it's expected now.

One of the awesome heads of PCBSD just recently replied to another person's post about this same issue. Search this forum and you'll see that it was a pretty simple adjustment.

[milkthistle]

One of the awesome heads of PCBSD just recently replied to another person's post about this same issue. Search this forum and you'll see that it was a pretty simple adjustment.

First thing I searched for before joining this forum It's still slow compared to Windows/Linux. PC-BSD still has ways to go before the everyday user will be happy to use it.

[sg1efc]

First thing I searched for before joining this forum It's still slow compared to Windows/Linux. PC-BSD still has ways to go before the everyday user will be happy to use it.

Well, Windows, Macs and even Linux have their own problems also.

[Apatewna]

Your original question of "reading files off of a UFS formatted drive" can be answered with ufs2tools (http://ufs2tools.sourceforge.net/). There are alternatives, as I see through a quick search for "windows ufs" but they are classified as "recovery tools" and thus they cost money.

You have to take the drive out of your FreeNAS and plug it into your windows machine (which I assume you have). More info on the site above.
Things can get complicated however if your NAS is using some form of RAID, in which case I suggest you keep a local backup of your files outside the NAS box.

They way I did it at work, I had a gmirror RAID setup on FreeBSD and kept a regular schedule of copying the entire samba shared folder from the BSD box onto a separate disk in windows.

[Emegra]

Thanks for the reply,I did look into ways of reading ufs drives in both windows and linux, I believe it's possible with Linux but it involves recompiling the kernal which is something I'm not comfortable with, the only solution I could find in windows was a program called ufs explorer which is quite expensive, so for me the best and easiest solution was to install PC-BSD on a secondary hard drive and use that, after I first installed I thought it looked good and thought I could use it as a secondary system.

I should point out that i'm not a particularly computer literate person but in spite of that
I enjoy learning about them and working with them, I built and configured my own NAS and have 2 PC's, 2 Laptops, 2 softmodded Xboxes and other devices that all communicate with it automatically yet after almost 3 weeks of typing terminal commands, installing useless software, editing .conf files, posting messages on this forum, & complete reinstalls I still can't get PC-BSD to connect automatically to my network so it's all good and well for CDN to say "I wouldn't ever ever give up on an O/S that looks as clean and organized as PCBSD" I agree it is clean and organised but with respect to CDN human endurance is finite and there has to be a point where I have to admit defeat and admit I can't make PC-BSD do this simple thing, the same simple thing I can make other operating systems do (Windows, Linux, XBMC).

Anyway the truth is i haven't really thrown in the towel I'm still trying but pride prevents me from asking for help after saying I was throwing in the towel and apart from that I'm so confused with this system i don't even know what questions to ask anymore.

Graeme