my thoughts on FreeBSD

[Narvi]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Scott I. Remick wrote:

>
> --- Matt Jarjoura <matt at tasonline.com> wrote:
>
> > A) RedHat and SUSE both have GUI installers.  -- Honestly, how
> > important is it that FreeBSD remain a TUI-only menu based
> > installation-??  Sure it's simple, but screen-shots of it sure don't
> > appear appetizing to ISPs in a 2 week window.
>
> Actually, it's important for 3 reasons:
>
> 1) Compatibility. You can't even depend on 640x480 working on every piece of
> hardware you might wish to install FreeBSD on. Some embedded applications
> can't do any graphics.
>

this is not an argument against GUI installer, but simply keeping another
way open.

> 2) Speed. I'm still rather green w/ FreeBSD compared to many, but I can fly
> through the FreeBSD setup in just a few mins.
>

you could teh same with a gui installer on anything - gui speed is really
unliekly to be an issue.

> 3) Old cruft. Apparently a lot of people are too scared of the whole
> ncurses/sysinstall beast to dare revamping it. It works, and it's
> tried-and-tested. It's easier and safer to make minor modifications to
> support new versions than to overhaul it.
>

This is a very good reason for killing it.