In the open source operating system world Linux gets most of the attention and many of the other free operating systems struggle to even get heard. One of these is PC-BSD, an open source OS based on the stable FreeBSD OS and today iXsystems announced the release of PC-BSD Edison, or version 1.5.

PC-BSD 1.5 is based on FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE and as such builds on the renowned security in FreeBSD while making it as simple as possible to install and manage.

PC-BSD has what it calls a Push-Button Installer wizard, developed exclusively for PC-BSD, that lets users download and install a wide range of available applications in a self-extracting and self-installing format. FreeBSD package management works slightly differently to Linux systems and so a simplified method is exactly what most new users will want.

Highlights of the Edison Edition include the availability of an AMD 64-bit version for faster performance on hardware currently running 64-bit intel or athlon processors. Other new built-in features include Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, a new system updater tool, improvements to the PBI Removal and WiFi tools, BSSID support and improved SSID support, a new sound detection program, and a new PBI icon preview library.

On its desktop PC-BSD runs KDE 3.5.8 as the desktop environment.

Installing new software on PC-BSD is slightly different to both Linux systems and the traditional FreeBSD ports method. The main difference is that there is not a dedicated package management application. To install you need to find the packages you need on the PBDIR website and download them. Once the download is complete PC-BSD will automatically launch the installation for you, not unlike installing software on Windows (download->double-click).