This distribution is based on BSD, so I knew a handful of things about it before I even put it in the drive.

• This is going to be a secure system
• This is going to look like crap
• This is going to ask me unnecessary questions in the name of “user’s choice”

I haven’t worked with FreeBSD, NetBSD, or any other red-devil distribution as of the time of this writing so there was some room for surprise. Still, I think I got what I was expecting.

Booting the CD
When I think of LiveCDs I imagine user-friendliness, total hardware support, and generally something that will try it’s best to sell me on it’s power and style. NetBSD started by asking me the normal question of which kernel I wanted to use and I choose the default choice: “NetBSD Generic for CDROM”

The kernel ran itself and prepared a startup menu for me that would undoubtably ask me some questions about my region, my keyboard layout, any special hardware it needed to know about. Basically it’s the kind of questions your doctor would ask you.

Here’s our conversation:

• Network Configuration: Enter Hostname:

It gives me ‘cdrom’ as a default (?) and I tell it ‘kingdom’ (my computers name)

• Network Configuration: Enter Domainname:

Well, there isn’t one but I’ll make up one (’thisdomainnamesucker’)

• Use DHCP for network access?

Please.

• Enter the keyboard code:

Well, this could have been done in a much more friendly way (like letting me select from a list), but I take the default two-character code ‘us’ and off we go.

• Enter your country code:

This is getting silly. This really should be done with a menu. I’ll take the default ‘C’

• Is the BIOS time set on local time?

I don’t care, I’m just testing this distro (yes).

• Enter the local time delta (positive values for West of Greenwich, negative values for East of Greenwich in minutes:

Hahaha… they’ve gotta be kidding. This is nothing like Ubuntu at all.
Hmm, I’m in Seattle, Eastern is “-600″ so I guess I’m “-780″.

• Enter local time zone (default: ‘Factory’)

What the hell is ‘Factory’? Well, I’ll take US/Pacific (and I’ll type the whole thing out myself).

Finally the questions are over and it starts finishing the startup.

The Desktop

At first I saw it drop me off at a command line and I thought “aw hell no you don’t” but then it started X for me. I’m comfortable with the command line but not on an unfamiliar system. That’s a horrible way to start a new distribution experience.

It does start X but it seems to hang for a while with an icon reminiscent of the old wristwatch on MacOS that showed up when you had to wait for something. I got a good look at the icon because it took a whole minute for the desktop environment to startup.

Eventually it gave me a login box that had two usernames in it. One was “C. D. Rom root” and the other was “C. D. Rom user”. That’s kinda cool that they finally showed some humanity by throwing in a joke, and it’s even cooler that they let me get to choose this at startup. I’m a fan of no-questions-asked LiveCDs but it’s nice to get to choose your user experience before it starts.

I hope there isn’t a password on either account (that would be ridiculous) and I select one name and enter. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the password thing. There IS a password on the user account (the only one I tried) and It rejected me twice. Finally I put in the username as the password and it let me in. If they are trying to create any kind of security they shouldn’t be making LiveCDs. If they’re making LiveCDs they shouldn’t make them only for people who can guess (even simple) passwords.

For the record:
The passwords for NetBSD 2.0 LiveCD are as follows:
user: user
root: root

Desktop Environment

after login
Since after the initial question and answer session I had with NetBSD 2 Live it seems to be running really slowly. After I login it changes the wallpaper every minute for a couple of minutes before it finally lets me into the system.

Using KDE
To my utter surprise this serious-minded system that has so far been a pain to even start up runs KDE. It’s not true anymore that KDE lacks the functionality of Gnome but I’m surprised that the auspices of the NetBSD team hadn’t kept them from using something more familiar to the “good ol’ boy” crowd of old school developers.

So it gives me a KDE system to work with. An excellent choice for any LiveCD. KDE will be the most familiar for recent and potential Windows converts (and Mac OS X converts too).

Productivity on NetBSD 2.0 Live CD

Koffice
This distro decided to go with Koffice instead of the larger (but more functional) OpenOffice.org. I see the wisdom of this because it’s much faster to load Koffice applications than their OpenOffice counterparts. This is crucial with a new user. There’s also nearly every feature that a MS Office user will need present in Koffice.

I start with Kword. Works great. So does Kspread, Kchart, Kformula, and my personal favorite word: Korganizer. They all start very slow but by now I’m thinking that the slowness of this system is some kind of hardware incompatibility rather than directly a software problem.

Web browsing
NetBSD 2 doesn’t ship with Firefox as do most modern distros, but Konqueror is still an excellent browser (it’s the basis for Safari on Mac OS X). This will get the job done for most work.

Filesystems on NetBSD 2.0 Live

Unlike some LiveCDs NetBSD seems to have detected my local harddisks successfully. There are appropriate entries in /etc/fstab and appropriate directories in /mnt. However, I can’t get it to actually load the drives. This is a serious problem for me but possibly not even a problem with someone who’s more familiar with BSD systems.

Audio and Video on NetBSD 2.0 Live

As I can’t access my local drives I can’t really test this feature. At the moment it seems like there’s no sound but there isn’t really much of a way for me to test it.

Summary
This is not a useful CD if you’re trying to get a newcomer introduced to Linux. Seriously not user-friendly and (on my hardware) achingly slow. Still, it was the most accessible way for me to try out *BSD and I’m thankful that I got the chance (and got to reboot and forget about my experience with slow the slow OS).

Overview of NetBSD 2.0 Live

Installation	Some weird questions, but overall most people should be able figure this out quickly.
Ability to find necessary programs	The whole KDE suite is here (well, the 3.2.2 version)
Office	Functional. If you just need to edit something or are familiar with Koffice then this will be perfect for you.
Image Editing	The Gimp works great. It’s also got PDF, Paint, Scanning, Fax utilities and such.
Filesystem	Automounting -kinda. If you want to save any of your work you’ll have to ftp or email it to your self (unless you want to manually mount partitions like I did.