The FreeSBIE project is mainly the work of the Italian FreeBSD Users Group, G.U.F.I. Their project goals are:
FreeSBIE 2.0.1 is a bugfix release of the 2.0 version. FreeSBIE 2.0 had some annoying bugs, one of which was especially serious, as it prevents USB mice from working. All the bugs that have been pointed out were solved and this release has been more thoroughfully tested, to offer a better FreeSBIE experience to users.
This release of FreeSBIE is based on the new FreeBSD 6.2 release, both in terms of sources and of packages. It contains more than 450 pieces and 1.3 gigabytes of software, all in a single CD. To accomplish this, FreeSBIE is using FreeBSD's geom_uzip feature to compress and uncompress the entire /usr directory.
FreeSBIE 2.x is a complete rewrite, not an incremential update. Due to lack of foreseeable development in FreeSBIE 1.x, some patches were made in order to make particular programs work. Eventually, modifications to FreeSBIE 1.x lead to a patch-over-patch habit. For example, users who wanted to make a particular version of FreeSBIE had to add their own patches to the scripts. If the user's patches were unapplicable to the main tree, the user had to keep his own modified scripts in sync with the main tree by hand. FreeSBIE is completely redesigned as a modular system.
The FreeSBIE toolkit is quite easy and familiar for an average Linux/BSD user. It is Makefile-based, and it has a default configuration file that may be overridden by the user. In fact, creation of the CDs/DVDs is completely dialog based as well as the building and installing of packages. The FreeSBIE toolkit allows a user to make an ISO image in four steps. This four step process will create a simple ISO image with a vanilla FreeBSD-based system plus the packages you selected, if any. If you want to customize it, extra plugins are available to you. These plugins can add more features to your livecd, like creating a memory file system for /etc and/or /root and executing custom scripts that run inside the live filesystem environnement. These extra plugins could be used to add users and groups.
FreeSBIE can be used in many different situations but quite often it reveals its usefulness as a Rescue and Recovery tool. Up to eight slices and partitions per filesystem type (FAT16/32, UFS2, EXT2FS, ReiserFS) can be mounted for you by the mountdisks script or you can mount the hard disk yourself before recovering the installed system.
FreeSBIE uses a memory disk to store data. This means that once you have switched your machine off, any data you saved during the FreeSBIE session gets lost. This is not always what you want, so a tool (savebackup) which makes data backup easy is introduced. This script reads the file /etc/backup.lst, then creates an archive containing the data you chose to backup and puts it on a device you specified. The next time you insert the FreeSBIE CD into your machine, FreeSBIE will look for backup archives on your removable media and will try to restore your data automatically during the boot process.
Your privacy is very important. FreeSBIE provides two pieces of software that give you a hand in increasing your privacy level online: Tor and Privoxy. Tor works on your network connections to encrypt and redirect them to different routers on the Internet, making your provenience virtually impossible to recognize. Privoxy is used to increase the privacy level of HTTP. The PF packet filter included in FreeBSD is used to redirect outgoing TCP connections into Tor to protect applications that are not already configured to use Privoxy or Tor directly. FreeSBIE knows that their correct configuration is not an easy task and that many of you maybe interested in giving them a try, so the freesbie_tor script allows you to turn this feature on and off.
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