Newbie Experience

[Jeff Rollin]

On 11/09/06, backyard <backyard1454-bsd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sep 11, 2006, at 12:15 PM, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> > > Discussions like these leave me lost for words...
> >
> > Perhaps, although it seems you recovered quickly.
> > :-)
> >
> > > Which is to say, apart from the occasional bug I
> > really don't see
> > > what the
> > > problem is with sysinstall.
>
> I'm in that club myself. It takes a few times to get
> it down, but it is simple once you know the basic
> steps of getting FreeBSD on a box. The trick is of
> course understanding the basic steps which is where
> most don't take the time to research. I know I read
> through tha handbook a few times before I attempted my
> first go, and I know I messed up royally even still.
> But now its more frustrating to figure out what I want
> to do while the packages are downloading then anything
> else.


Heh!

Now it makes perfect sense to have
> one partition and multiple slices. It makes an fstab
> look a lot nicer. nothing more annoying then not
> having say a linux box boot because you selected the
> extended partitions number instead of the logical
> drive contained therein... and keeping track of a
> million partitions get old quick.


Nowadays of course you can (almost) do this by having one /boot and one LVM
partition, with the logical volumes within it. Plus, most filesystems allow
for resizing (in both directions) and you can combine two or more disks into
one volume group.

>
> > Fortunately, the outstanding docs available for
> > FreeBSD do a lot to
> > walk people through the process, even novices.
> > Unfortunately, people
> > want to use computers without having to read the
> > docs.  Just ask your
> > mom/grandparents/etc.  :-)
> >
>
> most people want to use everything without reading the
> manual. I think thats why there's labels on the
> toaster not to stick a fork in it, or a tag to not use
> a hair dryer in the shower... Personally I turn to the
> Cadillac shop manual when I want to tune up my eldo,
> it makes sense to me. I know software is the same way,
> but most people don't want to take any time figuring
> out what their doing; pardon my vulgarity but Taco
> Bell exists for a reason, man pages...
>
> > > To me it's the best thing this side of YaST for
> > > getting (certain areas of) system administration
> > done. (Yeah, I
> > > know a lot
> > > of you probably hate YaST in particular or Linux
> > in general...
> >
> > Why would you think that?  I'd imagine that most of
> > the people using
> > FreeBSD end up having a Linux box or two around for
> > one reason or
> > another.
>
> I find it was for not reading the FreeBSD manuals...
> if people think FreeBSD is hard I cannot imagine what
> they think about Linux. Sure it has that flashy
> install program, well except Gentoo and maybe a few
> others, but upgrading the kernel can make setting up a
> FreeBSD box from scratch WITHOUT the manuals seem like
> a cake walk...


Hmm. I'm pretty used to reconfiguring/upgrading the kenel on Linux, but
never having done so in FBSD I'm a bit wary. I guess a lot of it depends on
what you're used too. A lot of people using Linux these days, anyway, for
good or ill probably don't reconfigure or upgrade the kernel - the
distributors put everything but the kitchen sink in. These people would
CERTAINLY be scared off by having to edit a text file to reconfigure the
kernel, whereas these days in Linux you get a nice KDE window (make config
is still horrible - but though it's uncommented (and undocumented) it's
perfectly possible to reconfigure a linux kernel by editing
/usr/src/.config)

The nice thing about Linux is that in spite of all the noob-friendly
gubbins, it's still possible to do things the same way you did 'em when FVWM
was the hot news in the X Window world. Try getting the XP installer to let
you choose which of several useless packages you want to forgo installing, a
la Win9x.

Jeff Rollin