Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 23:50:10 -0800 (PST) From: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> To: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> Cc: chip <chip@wiegand.org>, Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>, <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD Intaller (was "Re: ... RedHat ...") Message-ID: <20020123233500.I32624-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20020124010710.C2760@over-yonder.net>
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On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Matthew D. Fuller wrote: > Hm. I must be a fairly hardcore idiot then, because I always forget the > first time :P this is what reference notes are for ;) > In fact, it took me several iterations before I realized that was the > source of the problems; I kept thinking that all the other 'things I > tried' were wrong too, because they didn't work, when in fact it was just > the first failed try continuing to haunt me. SLIP can be tricky at times, > hitting it dead right the first time is less than presumable. i never assume i get things dead right the first time. actually, i expect to make mistakes (these days, given a choice, i'll simply dd stuff over to a blank drive, and cross my fingers. this doesn't always work, though). > Try laptops. We all have ISA NE2k's in our junkboxes; my 386/16 has a > NE2k out of my junkbox in it. Most of us don't, however, have PCMCIA > NIC's in our junkboxes, and FreeBSD's history with PCMCIA isn't quite > stellar, so your chances of grabbing J. Random PCMCIA NIC and having it > work haven't been that great. Heck, the NIC in my current laptop only > works because I have a switch; it won't negotiate half-duplex, and because > it uses the ed driver, there's no ifconfig option to lock it to a > speed/duplex setting. If I had a hub, it would get about 6k/sec > sporadically, and I'd be better off with SLIP. i remember the PAO distrobution of FreeBSD. This pretty much made up for most of my problems with laptops and freebsd. of course, by the time i encountered PAO, i had a "decent" laptop (which is still around, actually) and i chose compatable PCMCIA eathernet card. The modem, on the other hand, has never worked.. > Is it common? Heck no. Is it a big glaring Problem From Hell in the > cases where it crops up? Heck yes. That's pretty much the standard for > sysinstall; not too shabby when it works, grandiose when it fails. well, this is a glaring problem with all of the "Free" OSs. When they work (which, in the last couple of years, is most of the time) they do a quite decent job. but, when they don't... it's a spectacular failure that "no one has ever seen before." i've seen this more often than i want to admit. with more than just freebsd, and well off in to most distrobutions of Linux. > Well, in the simple cases (i.e., what most people do most of the time), > when you don't make big mistakes, that's exactly how it is; and that's > one reason why, warts and all, it's endured so long; it works just well > enough that nobody can quite get up the gumption to start from scratch > (which is necessary) to write a new one (for free), because "Somebody > will do it Some Time Real Soon Now", but it's broken enough that we can > all bitch about it constantly until that Real Soon Now time comes. :-) i guess most folks find it "good enough".. i found this additude in the NetBSD community aswell, when it came to their pain in the @$$ installer. So far, out of the remaining "Free OS" BSDs, i've found FreeBSDs to be the more user friendly, and OpenBSDs to be slick and admin friendly - if not quite granular enough.. outside of that, the various linux distros that i've tried have either failed due to either awkward dependancy issues, or simply been to frustrating to do a "simple" install of the OS. as far as "writing a new installer", though, i think such a task is a bit daunting, since this is the first introduction to the OS that every user will have. i admit i am intimidated by the thought of dealing with that. -------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+ http://caustic.org/~jan jan@caustic.org "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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