The FreeBSD projects boast of the most stable operating system kernel in the world. Created from the University of Berkeley's BSD4.4Lite sources, it's a valid claim. And when such a kernel is blended with one of the most comfortable userlands of the world, magic happens. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring to you PC-BSD, a perfect fusion of BSD's kernel and GNU's userland-an operating system that's aesthetic, pleasurable and complete in every aspect, and which has been designed keeping the assassination of Microsoft in mind.

Just about a week back, I asked my father, "Why don't you use Linux?" He replied with another question: "Why do people use Windows?"

As much as we may rave about it, laymen are just not enamoured by or convinced about Linux:. We know that the days when Linux meant staring at a shell prompt and typing out cryptic commands, are long gone. Nowadays, most Ubuntu users don't know that they are using GNU/Linux: They find it much more aesthetic, usable and logical than Windows. They have no idea that under the skin of such an operating system is a heart so powerful and complex that it takes nothing less than a power-cut to bring the system down. No more black screens, no prompts, an integrated and tightly knit GUI...ladies and gentlemen, the future of UNIX computing is here.

Let's just forget Linux for a bit and, instead, face the ultimate truth. We are using a UNIX-like operating system. Yes, that's right. UNIX was born in AT&T's Bell Laboratories as a system written in Assembler for an ageing PDP-7 system. After the complex as got too difficult to maintain in Assembler, the C language was created and UNIX was re-written in C. By about 1977, Berkeley Software Distribution (that's BSD) started as a set of add-on software to Sixth Edition UNIX. Ultimately, by the time BSD4.4 came out, it had forked off from AT&T's UNIX and was on its own. However, 4.4 was the last BSD version, because BSD had run into licensing and patent issues. After the legal battle, 4.4 came out in 2 versions-4.4 Encumbered, with a lot of AT&T and some proprietary code, and 4.4Lite, with only the Berkeley code.

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4.4 Lite had huge chunks of the kernel missing-critical chunks, which made the kernel unusable. Two major projects started off, and each took the 4.4Lite code and started developing on their own. We know of them as NetBSD and FreeBSD. The former specialises in security, while the latter boasts of stability. Around the same time, Andrew Tannenbaum developed MINIX, a 16-bit UNIX clone to teach students operating system design. MINIX had nothing to do with UNIX sources. And, watching Andrew, Linus Torvalds came up with a 32-bit clone, called Freax. Freax did not have anything to do with either UNIX or MINIX sources. And after Freax was complete, the manager of Linus's FTP site changed the name to Linux, because he didn't like Freax. Thus we had five UNIX and UNIX-like operating system kernels: UNIX itself, NetBSD, FreeBSD, MINIX and Linux.

Bang Bang Bang-PC-BSD is here
Mac users love their as, and Mac as X is built on part of the FreeBSD 5 kernel and that entire userland. So some guy called Kris Moore took apart FreeBSD 6.0 (at that time it was the latest) and built his own as around it. Version 1.0 was released. The as aimed to be the most Mac-ish, using a BSD kernel, a highly customised version ofKDE 3, and a revolutionary ... ahem, Mac-like package management system.

Cut to the present: I'm sitting down in front of Mozilla Firefox 3.0.8, running on PC-BSD 7.1 Galileo Edition, based on the FreeBSD 7.2 pre-release kernel, and running KDE 4.2.2. Savvy?

Yeah! PC-BSD is refreshing after the bores and chores of Linux. It comes on a plastic platter 15 centimetres in diameter, and to get it started, you install it. To do that, you must pluck out some sort of a tray from the front of your PC, put the platter silver side down on that tray, and close the tray. Then restart your computer, and follow the steps on that huge box that contains installation instructions.

After the actual installation is complete, the first boot needs some attention. After X starts up, a pop-up comes along, telling me to supply some information about my graphics card. I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7l00/nForce 630i, and I don't like what I see. The string "vesa' is staring at me when I look at the field specifying the video driver. Not good. So I open up the drop down menu, and see three NVIDIA drivers-version 6{ for legacy cards; version 173, the stable drivers; and version 180, the current drivers. I select version 180, and X re-starts. WhoHoo! I'm finally staring at KDE 4.2.2. At this moment on, there really is no difference between PC-BSD and Kubuntu.