Preface: This article was written back when this Ezine was entirely based on FreeBSD. Please excuse me for being so biased towards that OS, and I promise future articles will not be.

When most people hear the word `BSD', they think of a robust server operating system based on 4.4BSD-lite. This is an operating system that is so well regarded that it is used by many great companies around the world to power web sites.

These companies range from small hosting firms such as BNL to very large corporations such as Yahoo!.

Like many other people, I use FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS. It functions great as that. I am writing this article in XEmacs, at home on my FreeBSD workstation.

What is this, you say? I'll tell you what it is. It is FreeBSD - quite possibly the finest desktop OS I have ever used. I run everything on it, from software to listen to my audio compact discs (using cdcontrol or xmcd), to chatting on IRC using one of the array of clients I have installed. I also use it for word-processing (XEmacs), graphics (The Gimp), games, browsing the web, and an almost infinite number of other activities.

Recently, the GGI-Project decided to start an effort to port their General Graphical Interface to BSD. This will add more of a multimedia feel and hopefully bring more 3rd party software our way.

Several projects are taking place to bring people more into the world of a desktop oriented FreeBSD. One project (of which I am a coordinator) is the FreeBSD X11 Desktop Theme Contest. This contest awards the winners with some excellent prizes for creating a configuration for their favorite window manager and making that into a FreeBSD package file. The goal is to create an efficient user interface for new FreeBSD sys admins which will also look good. The prizes are a 12 GB hard drive, an awesome Matrox Millennium 2 video card with 8 MEGS of DRAM, and a FreeBSD Polo shirt.

Yet, I should now admit, FreeBSD is not yet the perfect OS for the desktop - it is only my favorite. More work must be done, such as drivers for more hardware, including scanners, printers, digital cameras, and the rest of the vast hardware world. The bright side is, work is in progress.

To the newcomer, FreeBSD and other Unix-like OS's probably make you feel like you are in the middle of the Pacific ocean with a leaky canoe. The addition of a user-friendly desktop environment may make this feeling go away. One of the nice graphical interfaces is "welcome mat". It offers a familiar look and feel for past users of Windows[tm], MacOS[tm], and other GUI-based OS's.

Unlike commercial operating systems, we are safe from our competitors - they cannot destroy us. Free software cannot be the victim of a hostile takeover, forcing the users to change operating systems in order to keep up-to-date with the latest advancements in the industry.

Currently the dominant Unix-like OS on the desktop is Linux. Linux has become a significant force in the desktop arena over the last five years. As both a server and desktop operating system, Linux is available in several distributions (RedHat, Slackware, Debian, and others). FreeBSD, as you know, has the ability to run most Linux binary files via our emulation software. It doesn't matter if a program has a native version for FreeBSD, if it has a Linux one it will probably run on FreeBSD. As I am writing this, I am listening to streaming music via RealPlayer 5.0 for Linux. It would be nice if Real Networks ported their software so I could have a native FreeBSD version, but the Linux one works great. Jordan K. Hubbard, one of the founders of the FreeBSD Project, wrote an article for another web site about this topic.

Several other people are also fighting to make Unix have more of a desktop market. One very large organization is the K Desktop Enviornment (KDE). KDE) brings an excellent GUI interface to the X Windowing System. This is not just a window manager, but offers an entire user system with audio players, games, editors, spreadsheet programs, their own web browser/file manager, and several other programs based on their uniform design interface.

NeoGeo (http://www.neogeo.nl/), the Netherlands' largest 3D animation studio, has released a beta version of their own 3D rendering software for FreeBSD and X11R6. By porting their software to FreeBSD, they have allowed us to have the chance to gain more market share in the graphical world than we have ever before had. When the product is finished, it will most likely be commercialware. As of this writing, it is currently in the beta stage of production.

Phillip Salzman