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Date:      Fri, 25 Jan 2002 19:01:53 -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:  <20020125190153.A71616@HAL9000.wox.org>
In-Reply-To: <3C51E7ED.25FF34BA@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 03:19:09PM -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> <20020125143213.A70659@HAL9000.wox.org> <3C51E7ED.25FF34BA@mindspring.com>

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Thus spake Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>:
> > The present installer has a fairly high success rate, at least in my
> > experience.
> 
> People keep saying this, but when you press them, they cop to
> not being first time users, or installing "FreeBSD only"
> systems, which is incredibly non-representative of the
> target audience for the installer.

FreeBSD was certainly not the first OS I've installed in a dual-boot
environment, but I don't consider myself an expert, either.  Let me
define `success' as ``It installs on the first try, without serious
fiddling.''  Admittedly, it's sometimes been a pain in the neck.  I
had an old Compaq whose BIOS didn't understand disks as large as the
one I was trying to install FreeBSD on.  Worse, the BIOS setup had to
be on a special partition on the disk, so if you tried something the
BIOS didn't like, you'd have to boot from floppy and re-image the
drive.

But you're right to call the target audience non-representative.  All
of my installs have been for myself and friends I've tried to convert.
All of them have been i386 boxen ranging from 486s to Pentium 3s.
Most of them have CD-ROMs and IDE disks, and few of them have network
cards.  Wait a minute, I think I've just described the hardware of
most people who need a helpful installer.  ;-)

> If you're honest, then if you already have a FreeBSD box
> installed, you could just maount up another disk on it,
> disklabel it, and install that way, instead.  The install
> stuff on the CDROM is for new users.

That's almost never practical for me.  I can't tell people ``Give me
your hard drive, and I'll give it back to you in a few days with
FreeBSD on it.''  Even on my own hardware, a CDROM is more practical.

But yes, the stuff on the CDROM is also for new users.  Many people
installing FreeBSD for the first time can get the OS installed, given
a decent partition editor, but they don't necessarily understand disk
geometry, or what to do if the installer can't find the CD-ROM.  Sure,
it would be nice if the installer could resize partitions and do
everything for you, but that seems a long way off.  Effort might be
better spent trying to get it to work right in situations such as the
one you recently experienced, under the assumption that the user has
left sufficient space for another OS.  Or is it the case that XP
greedily gobbles up the entire disk?  I (thankfully) haven't tried it
yet, but that sounds like a M$ thing to do.

> It complicates things, but the way that it complicates them
> is more a result of the tasks being disjoint and difficult,
> than it is of one of inherent complexity.
> 
> Finding the mouse is really very easy, and providing the
> keyboard navigation to make it work in the cases its not
> is a design issue.  The mouse probing code in Windows is
> actually shipped with the device driver sample code in
> Visual C++, so it's not like it's really hard to do what
> Windows does.

If all of the extra things the installer does were failproof, then
this wouldn't be as much of an issue.  Nonetheless, installation and
configuration ought to be separate.  The installer need only copy the
files for the base distribution, and perhaps allow the user to set the
initial root password.  Everything else can be dealt with after
booting the newly-installed OS.

> This is close to what you'd need, but it can't resize or
> create XP partitions.  This is mostly an NTFS issue, that
> has to do with writing the code.
> 
> It's actually fairly easy to do this right

Great!  When will you have it done?  :P

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