The PacBSD team is happy to announce that a new installation image in finally available for download for 64 bit x86 (x86_64) based computers. PacBSD is the rebranded successor to ArchBSD along with a new name comes several changes as well. For starters all of our packages have been rebuilt from the ground up with the focus of matching the versions that FreeBSD’s Ports tree has rather than trying to match what Arch Linux has which lead us into several issues due to the underlaying GNU/Linux vs BSD differences and we lacked the developer base to be able to resolve them. We also switched to using FreeBSD’s architecture names rather than what Linux uses so instead of “x86_64” we now have “amd64”.

Currently we are only supporting amd64 based machines, we may add i386 and ARM/ARM64 support in the future. We have two different install media a ISO for CD/DVD use and a IMG for USB devices. Be sure to select the right file for your use case when downloading. These are available for download at https://packages.pacbsd.org/iso. Currently the main packages available for testing are: LXDE, Chromium, Xorg, wine, transmission, and a few Window Managers. New packages are added daily and more DE should be available in a few days. Xfce4, Firefox, and VLC will be added to the repositories next. Though there are multiple PKGBUILDs for these already available at https://github.com/PacBSD/abs. You can view daily reports of the repository statuses, which includes broken packages, packages which fail to pull in dependencies, outdated packages and other information anytime at http://users.pacbsd.org/~repo/repo-report/. Installation help can be found at: https://wiki.pacbsd.org/Official_Arch_BSD_ZFS_Install_Guide. If you need additional help, feel free to join #pacbsd-chat or #pacbsd-dev on Freenode. All new uploaded packages, git commits, repository reports are posted to #pacbsd-dev daily as well.

If you run into any issues while installing or running PacBSD, please report them to https://bugs.pacbsd.org. For more information please see the the original release announcement. To learn more about the project visit our website.