Roll over Slimer. Nate Drake explores the latest GhostBSD and finds that, like Casper, it’s extremely friendly and easy to manage.
IN BRIEF
GhostBSD began as an OS to hack Gnome using FreeBSD tech. Although it’s now switched to MATE, it still lives up to its reputation of offering a userfriendly way to explore BSD.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz 64-bit
Mem: 4GB (8GB recommended)
HDD: 15GB (30GB recommended)
Builds: AMD64
According to the official website, GhostBSD is “a simple, elegant and friendly BSD operating system for desktops and laptops based on FreeBSD”. As the website diplomatically puts it, “BSD is generally considered beyond the average computer user’s knowledge.” Those niche users who want to try BSD but struggle with text-only installers seem to be GhostBSD’s intended audience, as it combines FreeBSD with its own graphical tools for ease of use.
GhostBSD has been in active development since 2010 and previously used Gnome. (The name is a portmanteau of ‘Gnome hosted on FreeBSD’.) The official desktop environment is now Mate 1.26.0, although there’s also a community edition using Xfce.
You can obtain the most recent version (23.10.1) from the main website both as a direct download and via BitTorrent. Should you fire up the 2.7GB ISO in live mode, you’ll see there’s a simple graphical installer.
The installer leverages OpenZFS, making it easy to install GhostBSD on ZFS alongside other operating systems. On the flip side, unlike FreeBSD, there’s no automatic support for full-disk encryption.
This is a shame, because the installer itself notes that one of the intended goals of GhostBSD is to offer an OS that’s secure and protects your privacy. Still, compared to other BSD distros we’ve reviewed, setup was an absolute breeze and install was complete within four minutes. Although we had issues setting a screen resolution higher than 1024x768 in live mode, once install was complete, GhostBSD’s VESA driver immediately offered all available resolutions.
In a nod to its FreeBSD roots, at boot users are still presented with an ncurses text menu offering options like being able to boot to single-user mode.
We used the official build with the MATE desktop, so after logging in we decided to start with tweaking its look and feel. GhostBSD includes 12 wallpapers. The bundled theme is customised but you can switch to Vimix, which is available in both lig
