PC-BSD version 1.5 - Edison Edition - was released, as announced by its producing company, iXsystems. PC-BSD is an open source desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE.

The most interesting feature of PC-BSD is the Push-Button Installer, or PBI, a wizard developed only for PC-BSD, which allows users to download and install applications very quickly, in a self-extracting and self-installing format.

The Edison Edition comes with AMD 64-bit support, Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, a brand-new updater tool, improvements to the PBI Removal and WiFi tools, BSSID and better SSID support, a fresh sound-detection program and a new PBI icon preview library.

Kris Moore, Director of PC-BSD Software Development, said: "The availability of 64-bit processor support translates into faster performance for those users currently running 64-bit athlon or intel x86_64 systems. This support, coupled with the other new features found in this release, ensures that PC-BSD Edison Edition will be the most advanced desktop operating system of its time."

Here's a more "technical" approach to the changes in PC-BSD 1.5:

￭ NEW System Updater tool - Keeps system & PBIs up to date - Allows override variables, so that admins can use their own mirrors / servers to roll out updates to users.
￭ NEW sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules
￭ NEW amd64 build of 1.5, including PBIs that are on our auto-build server
￭ NEW PBI icon preview library, now a PBI file shows the embedded icon on your desktop, not the generic "PBI" format icon
￭ Xorg 7.3
￭ KDE 3.5.8
￭ FreeBSD 6.3 Release
￭ Improvements to WiFi tool, BSSID support and better SSID support
￭ Improvements to the PBI Removal tool - Faster startup & remove a list of PBIs at a time
￭ Improvements to the firewall manager

The company that produces PC-BSD, iXsystems Inc., also provides high-performance computing blade servers, clusters and storage solution for the worldwide market. It is based in San Jose, California, USA, and supplies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux servers to a large cross-section of industries.

Download PC-BSD 1.5 right now from Softpedia.