FreeBSD 7.1 Content

[Randy Pratt]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:43:45 -0600
Dan Allen <danallen46 at airwired.net> wrote:

> 
> On 3 Sep 2008, at 3:11 PM, Steven Hartland wrote:
> 
> > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Allen" <danallen46 at airwired.net 
> > >
> >
> >> I too spend the time.  I am thinking that for other people to want  
> >> to  use FreeBSD they want something other than a command prompt.   
> >> They at  least want a web browser out of the box.
> >
> > For some, but for others like ourselves here we really don't want all
> > that bloat. One of the reasons we really like it is its perfect for
> > server installs, no crap installed that you don't want :)
> 
> Agreed, but if you go back to earlier versions of FreeBSD they gave  
> you an install option for just binaries, or binaries + sources, or  
> binaries + sources + X Windows.
> 
> I am proposing something similar once again, but this time if would be  
> enough of X, a small window manager, and Firefox so a basic windowing  
> environment was able to be installed, from the CD, with a single  
> choice.  I doubt many developers are really browsing the web all day  
> with lynx.

If I understand correctly, you've described some problems with wireless
and ethernet hardware on FreeBSD 7.  Others have mentioned that it
seems to work on FreeBSD 6.  It might be worth setting up two partitions
with one for 6 and the other for 7 so that you can work with the
developers to resolve the problems on 7.  As a desktop user, you may
not even notice the differences between 6 and 7.  I think this
is probably worth the time to pursue since developers usually can't
easily fix problems for hardware they don't have.

The content of the installation disks has been discussed in the past
but I don't remember anything conclusive coming out of it.  I
personally quit using packages around 3.x.  It was too easy to
introduce problems mixing packages and compiling ports so everything is
now built from source and updated daily.

The ports/packages are actually not part of FreeBSD but are third-party
applications.  I've often thought that the packages on the installation
disks should really be split to a separate project which produces
package disks.  This would lessen the burden on the Release Engineers
and perhaps the cycle time between releases.  It should also be
noted that the useful life of a package is limited and outdated very
quickly.

For my own taste, it would be a bit annoying to have any
port/package installed by default.

Randy
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