Installer

[Subhro]

Well this thread had been going on pretty long. Some people say for
the BSD installer, some throw out flames at it. My personal opinion
is, people who want to install and use BSD are expected to rad th
documentation and as far as I can remember, the handbook is pretty
descriptive about explaining the installation procedure. Unlike
Winshit ( read Wind0ze) and Linshit (read Linux) the performance of a
BSD box depends a lot on the steps taken and method followed while
installation. For example, for using soft updates effectively on your
file system, you need to break up the tree in different lables. You
can very well put the whole tree just under a single lable / (root)
but that would not let the kernel use its maximum potential. For
understanding these things some studying of the documentation is
required. In a nutshell, a BSD user can't be spoon feeded.

Getting to the point of RedHat, Mandrake and a few more installers the
poster had mentioned, try running your so called shining, sexy and
probably pretty looking GUI installer on an old Pentium I with just 16
MB RAM. You would understand what I am speaking about. On the other
hand, I use some throwaway 486s to make up a small cluster to solve my
problems and trust me, they work better in terms of raw MFLOP power
than even the latest Pentium IVs and Opetrons. I am not denying the
fact that any piece of software, however small it might be, always has
a good scope of improvement, and the BSD installer is not an exception
to the rule. But neverthless it DOES its work and does it pretty fine,
atleast I think so.

Getting to the point of crudeness of OS installers, do give a shot to
install OpenBSD on any kind of platforms. But OpenBSD is still one of
the most popular OS among network administrators as far as
implementation of packet filters, firewalls, routers (you can go on
naming) are concerned. And I believe the FreeBSD installer is much
polished than the former.

Regards
S.

-- 
Subhro Sankha Kar
School of Information Technology
Block AQ-13/1 Sector V
ZIP 700091
India