What FreeBSD users really want

[andrew clarke]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 09:03:47PM +1000, sammy sumer wrote:

> 1.    Reinvent the installer and interface.
> 
> Fundamental thing like system installer is still phenomenally arcane. There
> is no excuse for FreeBSD developers not to upgrade the system installer and

A lot of people consider FreeBSD as primarily an OS for use as a
mail/file/web server, so a graphical installer is not necessary.  The
text mode installer is looking a bit dated and could be made to look
more "polished", but I don't think this is a big deal.

> why not using disk imaging technology like Norton ghost or Acronis
> TrueImageinstead of the traditional installation.

Why?  Installing FreeBSD from CD only takes about 15 minutes on a modern
machine.  Faster if you do a minimal install.

A disk image wouldn't allow people to exlude parts of FreeBSD they
don't want to install, eg. X Windows.

ISO disk images of the entire OS ans selected binary packages are
available for burning to CD though.

> 2.    Integrate a PHP shell into the core of the system.
> 
> PHP is by far the most popular computing language in the world. Why not
> have a shell called PHP shell. So lots of web developers out there can
> easily create shell scripts in PHP syntax to automate and run programs on
> FreeBSD.

I already use Python for this, but I wouldn't want Python to be in the
base system as it would make it more difficult to upgrade to a newer
version of Python.

If you've used Python for a while you'd probably notice how much more
suitable it is for what you describe, compared to PHP.  I recommend you
check it out.

Regards
Andrew

Melbourne, Australia