Issues with PC-BSD 8.2

Coming back to work from my break, it was about time to get rid of FreeBSD 9.0 CURRENT on my production machine and to install a more stable system. As Grenville had almost only good things to say about PC-BSD (like a super easy ZFS installation), I gave it a shot.

I have to say: the installation process is really nice, not like FreeBSD. Took only a few clicks and a bit of waiting, and it worked. Installing additional programs was easy through the PBI system - for the software available. to get more, I had to use the ports system as usual. No problem at all, no conflicts (except that PC-BSD ships with howl, but I prefer avahi).

It's not all good and shiny though.Upon firing up VirtualBox for example, it fired up kdesu and asked me to login as root to continue. Well - done that, thought not much about it, must be PC-BSD's way. Same thing then for Skype, and things started not to make much sense, specially as Skype just wouldn't start that way. Upon firing up Wireshark it wanted to run it as root again. Well that's a no-no, except you really intend to, which most of the time I do not. It also comes up with a big fat warning if you do that.

I don't know why PC-BSd sets the programs up to start like that from KMenu or the KLauncher (ALT+F2), but it doesn't make sense. so to get rid of that behaviour, just right klick on the KMenu -> Menu editor , select the program in question, go to the Advanced tab and deselect the "run as different user" checkbox.

Now, the next thing to fix is Kile which complains about Okular not being installed although it is and getting KDE programs to find the printers, which GTK programs already do.