Selling FreeBSD

[Jon Mercer]

Jonathan Belson wrote:

>On Thursday 05 June 2003 2:49 pm, Ceri Davies wrote:
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>>On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 02:30:00PM +0100, Jon Mercer wrote:
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>>>I'm not sure that going for a whizzy install is going to make for a
>>>wider adoption of BSD. Has anyone looked at the Lehey column in Daemon
>>>News, it does touch on this.
>>>      
>>>
>>I'd agree that I don't feel there's a great need for a whizzy installer.
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>>
>
>Maybe not whizzy, but the current installer does leave a lot to be desired.
>As Jordan Hubbard explained, some of them are due to the limitations of
>the dialog library, but there are a number of sysinstall gotchas which
>you have to learn to avoid.
>
>Having installed a few linux distributions (RedHat and Mandrake) and
>solaris recently, I can see that sysinstall is really is showing its
>age.  Okay, not everyone want a step-by-step wizard install (although
>it's nice when you want to do a no-brainer install :-) but having an
>all-in-one installer that can detect your hardware (eg. monitor
>refresh rates) saves a lot of dicking about.
>

What I did really like about the SUSE distro was the Xfree86 setup 
(sax/sax2) under 4.2.0, which correctly set up my laptop with a Radeon 
mobility 9000 using the frame buffer devices. OK, I didn't get XGA 
resolution off it, but at least it made it work! Thank god for XFree 
4.3.0! XGA is a wonderful resolution to get!

>
>libh development seems to have stalled, unfortunately, so it looks
>like we'll be using sysinstall for a while yet.
>
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>>Something like Sun's JumpStart on the other hand, would be a major plus
>>in my opinion.  Yes, this is probably reasonably trivial, but if there's
>>    
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>What I like about the Solaris installer is that you can web browse while
>it's installing the system :-)
>
>
>--Jon
>
>http://www.witchspace.com
>
>
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