FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Available

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Friday, February 29, 2008 11:54 PM +0000 Matthew Seaman 
<m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:

> gregoryd.freebsd at free.fr wrote:
>
>>> On behalf of the FreeBSD Project thanks for your interest in FreeBSD.
>>> We hope you enjoy the new release.
>>
>> I've just spent the whole morning installing it on my office desktop.
>>
>> It was an awful experience: installing packages from the three CDs kept
>> making me switch from one CD to the other then to the previous one
>> before the next one again...
>> All in all about twenty-times !!! (sometimes just for ONE package, for
>> Christ's sake !)
>> It was particularly annoying, especially with those Linux guys around
>> sneering when comparing it to their smooth install.
>
> People in the know, and those with reasonable network bandwidth, generally
> use either the 'boot only' or just the 'disk 1' CDs to install a pretty
> minimal system, and then install packages, run cvsup, use freebsd updates
> etc. from the net.  It's a  whole lot smoother than juggling CDs.
>

That's true, however he didn't have an internet connection.  Furthermore, 
he has a valid point.  My custom is to install the base system and ports, 
then install bash and cvsup.  Just installing those two ports requires the 
use of both of the extra cds, because bash is one and cvsup is on the other.

I'm sure it wouldn't satisfy everyone, but ISTM if an attempt was made to 
put the most frequently installed packages on one cd, the problem would be 
solved for most people.  Since we're collecting those stats with bsdtstats 
now, we should have some useful data to work with.

Another approach might be to make one cd the "desktop install" cd, 
including all of the apps commonly used to install the desktop (xorg, kde, 
gnome, etc.)

It does seem to me that some work in this area would pay dividends.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/