Newbie Experience

[backyard]

--- Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:

> On Sep 11, 2006, at 12:15 PM, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> > Discussions like these leave me lost for words...
> 
> Perhaps, although it seems you recovered quickly. 
> :-)
> 
> > Which is to say, apart from the occasional bug I
> really don't see  
> > what the
> > problem is with sysinstall.

I'm in that club myself. It takes a few times to get
it down, but it is simple once you know the basic
steps of getting FreeBSD on a box. The trick is of
course understanding the basic steps which is where
most don't take the time to research. I know I read
through tha handbook a few times before I attempted my
first go, and I know I messed up royally even still.
But now its more frustrating to figure out what I want
to do while the packages are downloading then anything
else.

> 
> Credits: It's highly functional.  It can configure a
> lot of things  
> about a FreeBSD system, either during or after the
> installation of  
> the system.  It's CLI/remote-serial-console
> friendly.
> 
> Debits: It's oriented towards technical people. 
> People who don't  
> understand computers well in general, and the
> details of disk layouts  
> in particular, tend to get hopelessly confused.  Not
> only do they  
> usually not know how to access the help inside
> sysinstall, many times  
> the help text is not available, or is not
> comprehensible unless you  
> have the already-mentioned technical background.

I would have to concurr with this 100%. My first go at
FreeBSD was a little rough do to this whole concept of
two "partitionings." I thought to myself now why would
anyone want to do this. I wouldn't consider myself at
the time a novice, but I wouldn't consider myself too
bright either... Now it makes perfect sense to have
one partition and multiple slices. It makes an fstab
look a lot nicer. nothing more annoying then not
having say a linux box boot because you selected the
extended partitions number instead of the logical
drive contained therein... and keeping track of a
million partitions get old quick. 

> 
> Fortunately, the outstanding docs available for
> FreeBSD do a lot to  
> walk people through the process, even novices. 
> Unfortunately, people  
> want to use computers without having to read the
> docs.  Just ask your  
> mom/grandparents/etc.  :-)
> 

most people want to use everything without reading the
manual. I think thats why there's labels on the
toaster not to stick a fork in it, or a tag to not use
a hair dryer in the shower... Personally I turn to the
Cadillac shop manual when I want to tune up my eldo,
it makes sense to me. I know software is the same way,
but most people don't want to take any time figuring
out what their doing; pardon my vulgarity but Taco
Bell exists for a reason, man pages...

> > To me it's the best thing this side of YaST for
> > getting (certain areas of) system administration
> done. (Yeah, I  
> > know a lot
> > of you probably hate YaST in particular or Linux
> in general...
> 
> Why would you think that?  I'd imagine that most of
> the people using  
> FreeBSD end up having a Linux box or two around for
> one reason or  
> another.

I find it was for not reading the FreeBSD manuals...
if people think FreeBSD is hard I cannot imagine what
they think about Linux. Sure it has that flashy
install program, well except Gentoo and maybe a few
others, but upgrading the kernel can make setting up a
FreeBSD box from scratch WITHOUT the manuals seem like
a cake walk... I will admit to having a linux
partition on my laptop, but only because I haven't
taken the time to backup FreeBSD and give myself 15
more gigs... I will give Linux this, if I were
building an embedded system I would probably go with
Linux, but only because the obscure hardware sometimes
in PC104s has vendor supported linux drivers. That and
I understand how Linux boots better then FreeBSD, I'm
hoping this will change soon; even have a Treo 650
lying around with X windows name all over it... might
have to try OpenBSD for that one though...


-brian