diskless (or rather, readonly)

[James Mansion]

>You keep lab notes right? It would be nice to see the lab notes.

I would if I were going to go on that journey, but I'm not going to.
I already went there on Linux and I can just use that.  As it is, I
just installed Ubunto onto the box in question.

>No, but, who do you expect to do all the work?  FreeBSD is developed by
>_volunteers_.  The current documentation team seems to be fairly saturated.

Yes, I know, but often its quoted that the documentation is supposed
to be differntiating, and in my experience whenever I dip in, I find
that they've been rotting since the 4.7 or so heyday.

>People who complain that things are broken but then don't pitch in to help
>fix the brokenness don't improve the state of FreeBSD.  It takes a fully
>cooperative effort from all concerned.

Well, tough.  Like I say, I'm a consumer.  I buy OS disks rather than
download them (6.1 came in FreeBSD 6 Unleashed).  I've heard the
arguments before (I've been developing on UNIX for nearly 20 years
now) but I have my own systems to focus on.  If you are trying to
make the point that _volunteer_ projects are fundamentally flawed
well, maybe you're right, and Mr Shuttleworth's largese will
prove an unstoppable source - we'll see.

I could do this stuff, and help.  But I'm not going to, because
I have my own priorities and not much time. But then, I'm not
looking for kudos from being involved, being a creator.  I'm not
in the OS business.  If you volunteer to be in that business, then
good for you - but at least take ownership of the responsibility
of being in the OS business.

Its really not OK to present something as being the best thing since
sliced bread 'as a complete system - not just a kernel' and then
run and hide and say 'you found a bug - fix it yourself and send
us a patch' at the first sign of trouble.  May be it was, but not
any longer.

I don't care.  I'll revisit FreeBSD when 7.0 comes out, at least
for this small diskless setup.  Or maybe not, if NetBSD gets its
act together with grub.

I remain gobsmacked that this particular installation scenario
isn't well documented and supported out of the box, given how far
flash and similar has fallen in price, and how FreeBSD et al are
handy as network edge devices that could benefit from running with
a had disk that's spun down even if not running from cache.

James