Today we have the great pleasure of introducing you to a new project that saw the light of the Internet for the first time this past weekend, on March 12, 2016. Meet ubuntuBSD!
What's ubuntuBSD? Well, we've asked that ourselves when we first spotted the project created by Jon Boden, and it's not that hard to figure out yourself, but just in case you're not sure, we can tell you that ubuntuBSD promises to bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux. It is inspired by Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
ubuntuBSD looks like something that has never been done before, and, as usual, we were very curious to see how it works, so we took it for a quick test drive. Please note that at the moment of writing this article, the ubuntuBSD project was in Beta stages of development, based on the FreeBSD 10.1 and Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
The ISO image is similar with the one of the Ubuntu Alternate ISOs, providing users with the versatile Debian text-based installer, which, from the start means that ubuntuBSD is currently targeted at the advanced Linux user who wants a more robust and reliable server or desktop operating system.
However, if you've installed Ubuntu Linux using the Ubuntu Alternate ISO image, which the Lubuntu flavor still provides, installing ubuntuBSD will be a walk in the park, and the entire installation process doesn't take more than 10 minutes on a modern computer.
Xfce is the desktop, ZFS is the file system
The best part of using the FreeBSD kernel is that you'll end up using the famous Z File System, or ZFS, a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems, with a separate UFS partition for /boot. As expected, ZFS support is completely integrated into the ubuntuBSD operating system.
Now, by default, ubuntuBSD can be whatever you want it to be, which means that if you want to use it just as your desktop OS, you can do so by choosing the lightweight and highly customizable Xfce desktop during the installation. Otherwise, you can opt-in to use ubuntuBSD as a basic Ubuntu server with all the tools you need and know.
ubuntuBSD is currently hosted on the SourceForge website and distributed as an installable-only ISO image for 64-bit (amd64) computers. You can also download the Beta of ubuntuBSD 15.04 (codename "Escape from systemD") via our website, but you need to be aware of the fact that it's still in heavy development and bugs might occur during or after the installation.
#ubuntuBSD featuring an #Xfce desktop with #Firefox, #LibreOffice and #Ubuntu Software Center pic.twitter.com/PH0VY9C9Ce — ubuntuBSD (@ubuntuBSD) March 20, 2016
