Replacing Win95 with FreeBSD for low cost home PCs

[Jeff Penn]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 11:49:51AM +1000, Charles Young wrote:
> 1. For reasons that I can only define as religious, I like to build
> things for a specific target architecture - which means optimising for
> the specific CPU and devices in the system. As I'm installing into
> offices that have generally grown organically, there is usually no
> standardised hardware. This means building a new kernel for each
> machine. While this does not necessarily mean anything once I get to
> install ports - philosophically I prefer to build an entire system in
> the same manner - I've a feeling (completely without measured basis I
> might point out) that OpenOffice.org, for example, behaves better if
> built from source on the target machine.
> 
> 2. I find updating from sources much cleaner that using packages. New
> Xft? no problem, just run a portupgrade -fr Xft.
> 
> 3. One of the companies has two offices separated by a VPN over an ADSL
> connection. Bandwidth through this is restricted. I have a push tool
> (imaginatively entitled 'pushtool') that triggers a cvsup, portsdb -uU
> and portupgrade with the supplied arguments on the remote machine. I 
> use this to do sitewide updates at selected moments using a central 
> CVS repository. Doing this via source means that often only patches 
> are transferred which I don't believe is ever the case for packages. 

Are you aware of the following site?:

http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.html

Jeff