The beastie boot menu.

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 30 November 2004 08:09 pm, Jason C. Wells wrote:
> --On Tuesday, November 30, 2004 10:28 AM +0100 Dag-Erling Smørgrav
>
> <des at des.no> wrote:
> > "Jason C. Wells" <jcw at highperformance.net> writes:
> >> The beastie menu is just another level of complexity.  It has very
> >> little to do with anything.  I had to learn about Forth in order to
> >> figure out how to turn it off.
> >
> > You can't have learned much if you think
> >
> ># echo 'beastie_disable="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf
> >
> > has anything to do with Forth.
>
> The point was that the boot menu doesn't add anything to the usability and
> that in at least one case, it was an unwelcome distraction.  The deletion
> of the menu is of little significance to regular users.  I didn't even know
> such a thing existed until I recently did my first work on the console in
> several years.  In fact, I haven't even looked to see if my remaining 4X
> boxes have this menu. If I would have done my upgrade to 5X yesterday
> rather than a month ago, I would never have known that the darned thing
> ever appeared in the system.
>
> It's just not important, not even to regular users.  The claim that FreeBSD
> is not suitable to regular users because the beastie menu is gone is silly.

You must not have any systems where ACPI or the APIC support is broken.  For 
people with those issues and those of us who work with them to debug those 
issues, the menu was a large step forward in usability.  For my personal test 
machines I simply added 'beastie_disable=YES' to /boot/loader.conf.  Not a 
major deal to turn it off if you don't want it.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org