Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 14:58:52 -0500 (EST) From: Steve Tremblett <sjt@cisco.com> To: mj@isy.liu.se (Micke Josefsson) Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: About introducing newbies to FreeBSD Message-ID: <200011011958.OAA17580@sjt-u10.cisco.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.001101090426.mj@isy.liu.se> from "Micke Josefsson" at Nov 01, 2000 09:04:26 AM
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+--- Micke Josefsson wrote: | | <--Slightly trimmed quoted from freebsd-questions --> | | Exactly my point of view in another thread some time ago. What a newbie needs | best is someone to put his/her questions to. If you are into BSD then recommend | BSD, if you are into Linux then recommend the same dist as you use yourself. It | can be very annoying for a newbie to see how helpless his computer literate | friend is with an OS he is not used to. | | Apart from that I'd recommend FreeBSD before anything else. Recently I had the | opportunity to introduce a guest professor to FreeBSD. She had really no | computer training from the sysadmins view, but was very keen to learn. So we | spent some time partitioning disks, discussing the pros and cons of partition | sizes and even opened up an old disk drive for fun. All this she learned a lot | from. But when it came to do the actual installation of FreeBSD the barrage of | questions was to much for her in the end. I made a trial installation session | with her and then she tried at least three times to do it herself, but failed to | answer the correct thing on just one or two questions, with a non-working | system as a result. A co-worker made her try RedHat 6.2, it installed as a | breeze and actually also setup the correct X-server for her. | | I have pointed out to her that RedHat puts more stuff on the drive than one (I | anyway) would want, but at the end of the day, disk space is ubiquitus and cheap. | And the pleasure of having got the system up and running gives her better | feedback, than the FreeBSD sysinstall does. | | Personally I really, really like the port/packages device and also, being a | minimalist, I like to have a small system first and then extend it with the | programs *I* want to be there, not what anyone else think I should be using. | | But then I have used computers since my Sinclair ZX80. The guest professor had a | user's perspective not the root's, and used to MS Windows program. | | All in all. The problem seems to have been sysinstall here. Or anyway the | program to perform the initial installation. Imagine that sysinstall is used for | post-install configuration only or installation for the advanced user then | another couple of boot-diskettes could be used to a more user friendly | installation interface (and better looking, specially after setting my locale:) | for newcomers or any 'generic' user. Personally I do not like the idea of a | generic user, but some people, specially the ones just trying FreeBSD for the | first time or are not that computer savvy might find this handy. We don't want | to scare people away from FreeBSD. | | <-- end of quote | | Do you have any comments on this? I'd love to hear them. I agree with everything you said. I think there should be some info available in sysinstall (or whatever replaces it) explaining what is happening in each step, and the relevant terms. My background is mainly Linux with some Sun and DEC, and I found the installation quite difficult my first time through, mainly because all the docs said basically "Here's how to make floppies... now that you have floppies, boot with them and follow the steps onscreen." It was impossible to follow the steps onscreen because the terms were so foreign and were not explained anywhere. The terms I speak of here are the FreeBSDish terms (as opposed to generic UNIX terms like users & groups) that every rookie asks about - slice? distribution? port? package? The context of each step is not explained. To be honest I haven't gotten a decent explanation of slices yet. I try to make an analogy to PC-land partitions, but I've been told that is incorrect. I understand that FreeBSD is a completely different fish from Linux, but realistically, Linux is the big boy in the PC *NIX world, and that means that Linux user's perspective should be considered in the installer. We all know that FreeBSD is great from experience, but to a rookie, the first install is what [s]he will remember. my $0.02 Canadian -- Steve Tremblett Cisco Systems To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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