Date: Wed, 01 Feb 1995 00:07:50 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> To: Morgan Davis <root@io.cts.com> Cc: jkh@FreeBSD.org (Jordan K. Hubbard), hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: sup: Ok, I'm gonna do it. Message-ID: <9872.791626070@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 31 Jan 95 23:05:57 PST." <199502010705.XAA01059@io.cts.com>
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> A friend of mine and I have a lot of experience working with different > flavors of Unix. We also happen to be a significant players at CTSNET > (a major Internet access provider in San Diego). We have been amazed > at how poorly documented routine procedures for FreeBSD happen to be. Thank you for articulating so well my exact feelings! It's a sad reflection on some of the downsides of the whole ``hacker ethic'' when you hear some of our own core team members say, with a twinge of perverse pride, that "They've never installed FreeBD from scratch." Then try sitting behind a _skilled programmer_ who's totally new to FreeBSD sometime and watch him try to install the system. You may even learn a few new words! :-) Now not to beat on the core people too much - a big reason a lot of them never install has to do with resources. They have one key machine they can't afford to lose or they're balls-to-the-wall on some project and don't have time to spend on things like watching FreeBSD install. But it's still pretty important, nonetheless, and getting involved in *doing* the FreeBSD installation is almost an exercise in controlled dispair. Once you start really getting into it, you're struck by the sheer magnitude of what's MISSING. Argh! Just sit down for 10 minutes and you can think up about 20 things that somebody REALLY should go off and document, or automate, or even just plain FIX! So yes, there's very little that's truly OBVIOUS about the system and obvious is what it all really needs to be. Why? For the rank newbies who just want to say they ran a UNIX on their PC? No! For me, it's doing it for the professionals who are in a DIFFERENT AREA of the industry! People who are doing graphics, or video mixing, or service providerships, or audio work, or games development, or counting tree-rings (really!) or any one of a hundred different things that *I* think are cool! I want those people running FreeBSD so that I can use it as a springboard to go find out more about THEIR stuff! Just having a stupid OS sitting here staring at you is BORING! :-) :-) And for all of those people, being wholly trained in other disciplines that may not include operating systems, they need FreeBSD to be EASY TO INSTALL and EASY TO USE. They need to be able to relate it quickly to the kind of work THEY are doing or clearly there's no point in running FreeBSD for them! I am ambitious. I want to see FreeBSD running at ice stations, monitoring weather equipment and making the data available over the Internet. I want to see it in high schools and colleges, providing cheap instructional computing. And I want to see it in small and medium sized businesses doing Real Work(tm). I know that I will not see it doing any of those things if it is not easy to install and easy to use. I shall therefore be putting ALL of my spare effort over the next year (I hope!) into this area and let other folks worry about the kernel and general system integrity. They do that better than I do anyway! :-) > After I installed 2.0R in November just after it was released, I > exited from the nice installer interface wondering, OK, now how do I > get back to that? The installer ought to be EASILY reentrant -- I had In 2.1, that nice installer and "the nice system management tool" will be two seperate things, and much more directly pointed at. In 2.0, sysinstall never really crawled above being just a one-off installer and thus we weren't exactly keen to point people at it! :-) > The frustrating thing? I know that there is greatness here. Why hide > it? Sigh. I would like that on a T-shirt: Front of shirt: "UNIX" (big letters) Back of shirt: "Even though we did our best to hide it, there's some great stuff in here!" :-)
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