There's a new version of PC-BSD....

Until now, it's been version 9.2 but yesterday, they released PC-BSD 10.0, and 
therein lies a tale....

I had been doing something on the 9.2 version when the pop-up came along announcing the upgrade to version 10.0. I accepted the invitation to upgrade, and it promptly began downloading copious quantities of programming. Then, after about 20 minutes, up comes an announcement informing me that the process had failed. I tried a reboot....

For the next hour and a half, programming was being deleted, and then attempting to re-install itself. When that finished, the program didn't work.
I installed the version 10 from an .iso made into a DVD, after nearly three hours of downloading that .iso - it's 3.6 Gb - and finally, I got to the login screen....

Normally, this would almost be the end of the story, but not so yesterday. After I got logged in, and downloaded the system information and the ports list for it
to do its updates, my next visit was to AppCafe where i expected to find the lists
of the 1169 programs made to work in this system, and without which, you can't do a hell of a lot except use a generic browser, and check your mail....
When I opened the AppCafe, I'm shocked and amazed to see that there's sweet essence of nothing in it - not a single program - nothing. And all this after about
eight hours of farting around trying to get something going. I had a perfectly good version 9.2 at the beginning, and now it's gone, and here's a new version that won't show me its normal program content. Wonderful.

So I spent another hour, re-installing the original version 9.2, and sending the
folks at PC-BSD a bug report. Today, I got a reply from someone there, suggesting that maybe I'd mistakenly downloaded a beta version instead of the regular release. Not a chance. I downloaded what was advertised as the new stable release. And after waiting for about three hours for the .iso to download, and then turning that into a DVD, I'm just delighted to discover that the whole thing was an exercise in futility. The new version I got definitely wasn't ready for prime time. That surprises me, because normally, these folks are quite careful about what they do. They don't make a whole bunch of mistakes. So I'll wait a while, until they work on this more, and then try again later. Meanwhile, there's nothing wrong with the previous 9.2 version. It works fine. Better than its new
replacement, as I discovered.