Installation - More user friendly

[Peter Risdon]

Shaun T. Erickson wrote:

> JJB wrote:
>
>> WD
>> My web spider robot found this web site which is not on any of the
>> search engines yet.
>> www.a1poweruser.com
>> Looks like it offers what you want in the way of user-friendly
>> step-by-step instructions to installing FBSD.
>
>
> 1) Surreptitiously plugging your own site, is crass, at best.
> 2) Not telling him you charge for everything there, is devious.

Yet another 2c' worth...

If anyone writes any documentation for FreeBSD, an operating system they 
got for free and learned about for free, partly through reading free 
documentation submitted by others, I'd personally admire their efforts 
more if it was submitted to the handbook. Luckily for us all, some 
people have taken this view already.

The reason FreeBSD does not have graphical tools and wizards for the 
installation (or anything else, really) is that nobody who could has 
felt inclined to write the code for them. That's for some pretty obvious 
reasons. For example, no functional advantage would be gained from 
hundreds of hours of work. A bigger user base comprising more unskilled 
users would not work, even with smart graphical tools, without some kind 
of support infrastructure. Where's that going to come from? A lot of 
people are sick of wrestling with systems that have gui tools that 
either don't work properly or don't work at all (though this has 
improved in recent years), and don't let you beneath them so you can fix 
the problem directly.

But there's nothing stopping anyone using the existing code and writing 
some snazzy tools, then selling it as a commercial distribution. It's 
almost worth typing that again for emphasis. A commercial distro would 
be the channel through which support infrastructures could be developed.

The various Linux distros illustrate this. Red Hat, Mandrake and others 
charge money and provide graphical installs. Debian, probably the Linux 
distro closest to FreeBSD in orientation, does neither.

Hardware compatibility aside, it's arguable that the answer to this is 
that if you want a graphical, simple to use version of FreeBSD, then buy 
Apple OS X.

PWR.