From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 13 12:11:38 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ED94516A4CE for ; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 12:11:38 +0000 (GMT) Received: from mproxy.gmail.com (rproxy.gmail.com [64.233.170.192]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8C54E43D3F for ; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 12:11:38 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from subhro.kar@gmail.com) Received: by mproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id 80so250181rnk for ; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:11:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.38.179.17 with SMTP id b17mr1986605rnf; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:11:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.38.206.40 with HTTP; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:11:37 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:41:37 +0530 From: Subhro To: James Skinner In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <200410122208.i9CM8pO22252@clunix.cl.msu.edu> cc: Jerry McAllister cc: Newton cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installer X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: Subhro List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 12:11:39 -0000 Well this thread had been going on pretty long. Some people say for the BSD installer, some throw out flames at it. My personal opinion is, people who want to install and use BSD are expected to rad th documentation and as far as I can remember, the handbook is pretty descriptive about explaining the installation procedure. Unlike Winshit ( read Wind0ze) and Linshit (read Linux) the performance of a BSD box depends a lot on the steps taken and method followed while installation. For example, for using soft updates effectively on your file system, you need to break up the tree in different lables. You can very well put the whole tree just under a single lable / (root) but that would not let the kernel use its maximum potential. For understanding these things some studying of the documentation is required. In a nutshell, a BSD user can't be spoon feeded. Getting to the point of RedHat, Mandrake and a few more installers the poster had mentioned, try running your so called shining, sexy and probably pretty looking GUI installer on an old Pentium I with just 16 MB RAM. You would understand what I am speaking about. On the other hand, I use some throwaway 486s to make up a small cluster to solve my problems and trust me, they work better in terms of raw MFLOP power than even the latest Pentium IVs and Opetrons. I am not denying the fact that any piece of software, however small it might be, always has a good scope of improvement, and the BSD installer is not an exception to the rule. But neverthless it DOES its work and does it pretty fine, atleast I think so. Getting to the point of crudeness of OS installers, do give a shot to install OpenBSD on any kind of platforms. But OpenBSD is still one of the most popular OS among network administrators as far as implementation of packet filters, firewalls, routers (you can go on naming) are concerned. And I believe the FreeBSD installer is much polished than the former. Regards S. -- Subhro Sankha Kar School of Information Technology Block AQ-13/1 Sector V ZIP 700091 India