Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 08:45:52 -0500 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: bastill@sa.apana.org.au, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: A question from a convert from Windows to FreeBSD Message-ID: <20020124134552.F16D93F56@i8k.babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <02012419032304.01209@BAPhD.gihon.org.au> References: <0ffe01c1a371$661d1b20$6600640a@attbi.com> <02012419032304.01209@BAPhD.gihon.org.au>
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On Thursday 24 January 2002 03:33 am, Brian Astill wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 January 2002 04:49, Douglas R. Spindler wrote:
> > I've been in the industry for 10 years now and have seen the light of
> > FreeBSD. I know a few Unix commands and know DOS very well.
> >
> > Here's my question, why do you guys make converting so difficult?
>
> An interesting question, and I note that of the replies I have seen,
> only Bob Geisen seems to understand the issue.
>
> You would think that installing from CD (the most obvious way, IMHO),
> that the install procedure which can, and does, find your network
> card and set it up correctly does NOT find your modem. (It doesn't find
> your sound card either, but I guess you can do without sound)
> FreeBSD with its ports collection virtually depends on your Internet
> access, but leaves the modem setup to you. Go figure.
Hmmm . . . I admit that as one of the people reading the thread I was unaware
of that issue. Not because I am Unix literate (though I am; I first used BSD
Unix more than two decades ago), but rather because I have a cable modem,
which presents itself to the computer as a network card.
I think that network cards are setup automatically by the install because
it's plausible to do an install over the network using a network card, but
doing one over a modem (even at 56K) would be preprosterous.
So the problem isn't so much that the *install* is lame (Windows installs
don't, in my experience, set up modems, either); but rather that the
POST-install environment doesn't offer any "wizards" to set up the various
hardware.
I'd agree that this is a weakness compared to Windows. Of course there may
be some packages that do this sort of thing, but I'm not familiar with any.
I *can* tell you that Linux (I'd especially recommend Mandrake for this sort
of thing) *does* have lots of wizards and similar tools for configuring your
system. I personally dislike such things and in fact I switched back to
FreeBSD from Mandrake Linux largely because Mandrake had gotten entirely too
"user friendly" for my taste. (Meaning that I couldn't *find* the scripts so
I could set things up for myself, so hidden were they under all the wizards
and other GUI crud.)
But if you are looking for a Unixy system and is more stable than Windows and
you want more wizards and hand-holding than FreeBSD, I'd recommend you look
into Linux, especially Mandrake Linux. (RedHat, though a very popular
distribution in the USA, lags way behind in this area. Slackware
deliberately avoids that sort of thing, and would be quite FreeBSDlike in
that regard. The myriad of Linux distributions is a confusing aspect of
Linux.)
I hope that FreeBSD will get there someday but I agree it's not there yet.
And of course I hope that it gets there by having somebody write nice wizards
on top of what we have now rather than by changing things around to support
the GUIs, which is unfortunately what Mandrake seems to have done.
> The problem seems to be that a high proportion of people installing
> FreeBSD are Un*x literate, and are not operating on the same wavelength
> as the converter from WinDOS. Such people access the Internet through
> a server, not from their own modem, I suppose. Hence no automatic
> support for modems.
>
> I had trouble using X as a user. The solutions offered - like "install
> Xwrapper" (which already existed on my system) - were unusable by me.
> A knowledgeable friend gave me the commands to change the mode
> (whatever that means) of the Xserver. That worked just fine on my
> single-user system. He understood whereas freebsd-questions did not.
> Not a criticism, just a comment.
Something was squirrly on your system, and I wish we could have figured out
what it was so that it wouldn't bite others in the future. Installing
Xwrapper is *supposed* to "just make it work." It did for me. I didn't have
to chmod (which means to change permissions, by the way--not sure why it's
called "chmod") or anything else to get it to work for a regular user, and I
have no idea why it shouldn't do the same for you.
OTOH, I knew about chmod and saw your post (and even responded), but didn't
mention it because I wanted to "solve the mystery" and because Xwrapper
*should* have worked, so I guess I'm "guilty as charged" in seeing things
from the developer/system point of view, being at least as interested in
helping fix the system as I was in getting you going right then.
I'll try personally to be a little more sensitive in the future to helping
somebody out of the immediate crisis as well as the long-term perspective.
Though I still suspect that if you'd un-instlaled and re-installed Xwrapper
it might have fixed things up . . . or did you try that?
> Basically, help needs to be offered at the level of the enquirer, not
> at the level of the answerer. That seems to be the issue almost
> wherever one goes to find out about FreeBSD.
This seems to be to be a fact of the human condition rather than so much of
FreeBSD.
And I know that there are evangelists for FreeBSD who'd like to see it take
over the world who will be dismayed at this posting of mine, but I think that
it's better to steer people to something that will make them happy than to
try to pretend that FreeBSD does what it doesn't do. It's great if you want
to have total control and edit scripts and such-like; if you want wizards,
you probably want to go elsewhere. (At least for now).
(Though Gnome/Enlightenment might have wizards. I thought that KDE would but
in quickly poking around I don't see any modem wizards -- but I don't know; I
haven't ever used a modem on my last couple of computers, and perhaps KDE is
so clever that it detects the fact that there is no modem and doesn't present
the wizards to control what isn't there.)
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <-----------
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
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