I start my day by reading news sites like digg.com, slashdot.org, osnews.com, theinquirer.net, theregister.co.uk, bugs.kde.org, and some more, and then concentrate on the PC-BSD forums and answer the questions I know best. Sometimes I edit posts to correct misspellings, typos, and formatting. This may sound strange, but English speaking users sometimes make obvious spelling mistakes. English is my third language after Estonian and Russian, but I started with English by learning written language first, then moved to speaking part of it--the exact opposite order to native speakers.
Of course I read various mailing lists too, especially FreeBSD hosted like geom@, stable@, usb@, emulation@, pf@, and others. The FreeBSD documentation project comes in handy when dealing with various problems in PC-BSD, but sometimes an inconsistency is found and I send an email to their documentation team for clarification.
I have experience in designing networks for ISPs and knowledge in networking, which helped me to bring PF firewall into PC-BSD installer. Know-how from terminal-server project gave me information about what system administrators need for their multiuser computing systems and I hope we can make the admin's life much easier by hardening PC-BSD and preconfiguring many not-so-important features by default.
Charles: I coordinate translations, search for new translators, fix translation problems such as XML syntax errors, and follow up on tasks. I'm also learning how to use Pootle, a web-based translation tool that Josh kindly set up for us. Also, I learned how to use Trac, a pretty neat web-based collaborative tool. I help Andrei gather bugs and file bug reports. I also test PC-BSD prereleases when needed. Several times a day, I check out the forum to see if someone needs help, or to see if there's something new and important. Also, I do some web design and graphic design, although my skill is limited in this area. I create and maintain some essential PBIs such as OpenOffice.org, Opera, the codecs, the Flash plugin, the Microsoft fonts, lighttpd, and some scripts to generate some PBIs automatically from a port, which greatly reduces the amount of development time.
I write tutorials for the PBI Tutorials section of the knowledge database. I also help Gerard write documentation; I wrote a great deal of the Quick Guide. I do some research on how we can enhance the PC-BSD GUI (mainly KDE) according to our users' tastes. Also, I usually open some polls on our forum to see what people prefer before we implement new features or before changing something that may trigger religious reactions! I manage a fair amount of the site, putting some of the news online, updating stuff such as the forum and the FAQ engines. One important thing also is testing PBIs and managing the PBI directory. I also make sure the mirrors are synced before adding new applications and that there's no older version already added in the directory.
Also, I try to fix some i18n issues and font problems. For instance, new users who miss the Microsoft fonts that the Windows desktop offers can use the same fonts exactly the way they look in Windows because PC-BSD includes a set of XML files that I developed, which includes tons of rules that display Microsoft fonts. I also try to find solutions to some bugs that aren't too complicated and add some fixes to bug reports. A fair amount of time that I dedicate to PC-BSD is spent doing research, learning stuff like shell scripting, and discovering new stuff. I like to learn.
Dru: PC-BSD strives to provide an easy desktop computing experience on top of the rock-solid stability of FreeBSD. The 1.3 release includes a revamp of the already user-friendly installer as well as many other feature enhancements. Please walk us through some of these features.
Kris: The biggest portion of our coding went into the new system installer. Our old installer was the original one I wrote back for 0.3 beta and was really showing its age. This new installer has been written from scratch in C++/QT, and offers many new features over the previous version. One of the features is the ability to setup all your preferences before the actual install takes place. This includes setting up multiple users, firewall settings, network settings, and more. The new installer also has the ability to search for previous PC-BSD installations and upgrade them to 1.3. We also now have an option to install a "Desktop" or "Server" version of PC-BSD. Essentially, the installed packages are the same, but the server version defaults to running the Fluxbox WM, for the more advanced users who may wish to run a high-performance PC-BSD/FreeBSD server.
Another big feature that most users may not notice at first is that the installer CD now runs directly from RAM, which lets the user swap CD's during the install process. This comes in very handy, especially when the user is installing with a language other than English. The installer will now prompt for CD #2 during the install process instead of waiting for the system to reboot and requiring the user to finish the install procedure then. This will also allow us to begin work on some of our new features for 1.4, such as backup and restore options or system "cloning."
Andrei: I worked on 1.3 release so long that I start losing track what we made for this release already. As far as I remember we put the BSDstats script enabling option by default into LiveCD Installer. I proposed a similar statistical system for PC-BSD long before BSDstats, but my motto is: "Why invent yet another wheel!" The same goes for DesktopBSD Tools, which is already incorporated into PC-BSD starting from 1.2 release.
We moved language, keyboard, and time zone selection into first Installer page. Later I found out that Vista has a similar layout--this is purely coincidence, not a rip-off :) Adding multiple users and even the ability to change every username or password after they are already added to list is neat but not a major feature. Some paranoid computer users would like to encrypt their swap space and swap-space-backed /tmp, RAM-based filesystem for speeding up various file operations. It's small things that makes operating system usable.
Charles: A fair amount of the tasks you perform on modern desktops can be accomplished with PC-BSD, such as managing users, managing running services, managing network interface cards, and managing software in a familiar way. But there's more to come. Hopefully, this year users of PC-BSD will be able to manage PF using a GUI, and they won't have to learn how to use PF's syntax. You will be able to add/remove exceptions using TCP or UDP easily, just like you do on other modern desktops. A group or Samba share manager was also discussed to share directories/files easily with groups or single users using a GUI. For instance, you'll be able to share a "billing" directory with a "billing" group that you create, and you'll be able to add users of your network to this group--something that is invaluable in the enterprise.