Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 14:32:13 -0800 From: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.berkeley.edu> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chip <chip@wiegand.org>, "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why dual boot? Message-ID: <20020125143213.A70659@HAL9000.wox.org> In-Reply-To: <3C51CD33.4E69B204@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:25:07PM -0800 References: <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123223104.SM01952@there> <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20020124213809.00e6e5d0@localhost> <20020125131659.GB7374@hades.hell.gr> <3C51CD33.4E69B204@mindspring.com>
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Thus spake Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>: > I think the most common case of a new FreeBSD user is one > who is going to "try out FreeBSD" with some of the free > space on their (probably new) computer. For this to work > out in FreeBSDs favor, the fear-factor has to be removed, > which is that you can undo the FreeBSD installation once > it has been done, and that you won't trash your Windows XP > (or other Windows) system. I don't know if it's a question of fear as much as patience. I think most newcomers are clueful enough to deal with partitions and the idiosyncracies of the installer's UI, but if anything goes wrong, they'll just give up and try something else. That's what I did years ago the first time I tried to install FreeBSD, and I only came back about a year ago. The present installer has a fairly high success rate, at least in my experience. That could be improved upon by taking out things that don't belong there, like package installation, networking services, and X configuration. Once people get FreeBSD up and running, they're more likely to stick with it and deal with those things. Granted, there are also a lot of newcomers who *aren't* clueful enough to deal with partitions, or who don't have Partition Magic and would need to resize a Windows partition. Making the installation work for them is a far more ambitious goal, which requires a free utility that works like Partition Magic (only better). Such a thing wouldn't even have to come from the FreeBSD project as long as it had a suitably free license. It's too bad nothing like that exists. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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