GhostBSD is a desktop distribution that’s based on FreeBSD. The project started out with support for several desktop environments (Gnome, Mate, XFCE, LXDE, and Openbox), but has since become a MATE-only distribution.
The next stable version will be GhostBSD 4, which should be released within the next few months. Meanwhile The second release candidate was made available for download a few days ago. This article shows what the distribution has to offer, which, at this stage of its development, is not a whole lot.
GhostBSD has its own graphical package manager, but compared to the graphical installer of PC-BSD, another FreeBSD-based desktop distribution, it is very lite, feature-wise.
Automated and manual disk partitioning are supported. Not sure, though, whether it can handle dual-booting. I’ll wait until the final edition is released before trying to verify if it does.
A screen shot of the manual disk partitioning setup tool.
Like I alluded to earlier, MATE is the default desktop of GhostBSD 4. It’s one of those desktop environments that I don’t really care a whole lot about, but it works, and still has a relatively small but strong following. The default desktop, shown here, is one of three variations of the MATE desktop for GhostBSD 4. The dock seen in this screen shot comes courtesy of Plank.
A default installation of GhostBSD RC 2 takes up less than 4 GB of disk space, which is on par with the default installations of MATE on Linux distributions. A default installation comes with a standard selection of applications, including an Office suite. What I could not find on my test installation of GhostBSD is a graphical package manager. I’m willing to bet that there’s one in the repository, but I just could not find it installed.
The next three screen shots show other aspects of the desktop.
More information and download link for GhostBSD 4.0 RC2 are available here.
