Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 16:57:18 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> Cc: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Intaller (was "Re: ... RedHat ...") Message-ID: <3C4F5BEE.294FDCF5@mindspring.com> References: <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123091107.T32624-100000@localhost> <20020123124025.A60889@HAL9000.wox.org>
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David Schultz wrote: > I think FreeBSD's installer could be better, too, but it works in a > fairly straightforward manner as long as you don't have strange > hardware. FreeBSD's disk "slicing" and "partitioning" really sucks. The display in 512B sectors is not also in KB/MB/GB, even though there is plenty of room for the display. The "help" doesn't indicate "G" is an acceptable suffix (like it does "M"). When doing "partitioning", you can't use the last partition as a "hog" partition, so that you can resize the "/" (for example, since it's always too small for a developer). The only way you can resize is a delete/create pair. If you make a mistake, it is impossible to recover without a reboot, since the disklabel stuff is not reread following a failed "commit" (e.g. when you type in "/usr/local" instead of "/usr" because you had to recreate everything by hand to resize things, it wants to use the exisiting root FS, instead of permitting you to newfs it again, unless you delete the "slice", reboot, and redo the "slice", "partitioning", and "commit"). It's pretty damn unforgiving, in fact. The problem with fixing this is: 1) It requires a lot of scratch equipment 2) The release build process dependencies are not sufficiently correct to permit quick incremental changes to sysinstall 3) It requires a desire for a lot of coasters 4) There's no money in doing this thankless job unless you are a CDROM distributor 5) You can't even do it for the money, and still be allowed to use the FreeBSD trademark by calling it FreeBSD, unless you donate the code back, it happens to get accepted instead of rejected, and you thus remove your source of "value add" from which you expect to recoup the R&D costs with a proprietary FreeBSD CDROM distribution that has a technical barrier to entry for duplication (it might as well be under the GPL). Don't think that I don't have some incredibly choice words on Partition Magic, either. It has some incredibly stupid defaults that made me reinstall my Windows XP twice to get FreeBSD and Windows XP to coexist on the same disk. Grrr. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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