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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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