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Date:      Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:19:09 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.berkeley.edu>
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:  <3C51E7ED.25FF34BA@mindspring.com>
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>

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David Schultz wrote:
> > 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

FWIW: I had to reinstall Windows XP 3 times, and I nearly
didn't make it the first time, just to get a new eMachine
into a state where it was even possible to begin installing
FreeBSD.

For one of the iterations, I had installed FreeBSD before I
knew there was a Windows XP problem, and by the time I found
out after the install it was too late, and the XP "recovery
CDROM" I was forced to use zapped the disk back to "Windows
only" again.

So basically, I bought a machine with XP installed, and ended
up installing XP 3 times and FreeBSD twice just to get around
the partiitioning issues.

> 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.

Yes.  I ended up installing FreeBSD a total of 3 times,
since my last "successful" install after getting around the
partitioning issues landed me in the FreeBSD installer and
disklabel issues.


> 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.

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 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.

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.

The X is a little harder.  I'd mostly blame it on FreeBSD
not adopting the GGI code that was offered it under BSD
license by the GGI folks.  At a bare minimum, sans the
ability to probe the card entirely, it's possible to get
1024x768 graphics out of the cards with just GGI, and a
tiny bit of probing makes that even better.  The whole
"what monitor do you have and what frequencies does it
support" crap of tunneling information through a loss
human data link (not to mention card selection, which is
something that should come from post processing the PCI
IDs from the boot code).


> 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.

There is GNU tool: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

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, but the reason
it is not supported in the tool (and in the FreeBSD NTFS
being able to write, for that matter), is lack of sufficient
commitment, and a willingness to change some of the basic
interfaces, in order to *make* it work.  The Power Quest
people (the authors of Partition Magic) were able to reverse
engineer this without a lot of effort; technically, you don't
even have to handle the incremental write stuff, if all you
want to do is resize it, and the move is relative to the
start address, so moving an NTFS partition is a no-brainer.

-- Terry

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