At 7:58 AM +1000 6/16/98, Sue Blake wrote:

As it happens, I'm also a newbee-to-freebsd. When it comes to computing per se I'm a pretty old bee, but last week was my first attempt to do a freebsd install of my own. I'll try to keep this a bit short for now. I'd like to think that once I get more familiar with freebsd then I'll take the time to try and write some improvements to the install process based on what frustrated me. Of course, once I get these two systems going I'll probably be much more interested in working in other areas instead of redoing perfectly-good installs just to test out various ideas for the install process itself...

Wrt to packages, I'd make a slightly different claim than Sue does. I do think the packages should be there for the benefit of the newbie users, but I don't think *all* of them need to be shown at install time. In fact, I think it's counterproductive to show them all during the initial install. I ended up going thru the entire list, adding all kinds of things just because "oh, that looks interesting", or "oh, yeah, I've heard of that package, and always wanted to try it out". My first install was done over the net so I didn't run into the problem with the cd's, but still I would have been better off if I hadn't been distracted by so many choices while I'm just trying an initial install. Perhaps the initial install should just show a list of "the top 25" ports -- just things people are most likely need "right away". Things like perl5, bash, cvsup (and thus modula3), and lynx. Tell users that for everything else they can run sysinstall after they've done their first reboot, but don't drop them into that choice during the initial install.

The other experience I had (as a newbie) was that I decided to do my XFree config right in the initial install. I don't know quite what I did wrong, but my whole machine just went away at that point. After trying a number of things (including alt-function keys, I believe), I finally had to turn the machine off. By doing that I had exitted in the middle of the initial install, and so I ended up redoing the entire thing (all the way back to newfs-ing) simply because I didn't know what had and had not been done.

Still, I don't want to seem like I'm carping too much here. In these past two weeks I have also been doing my first investigations of WindowsNT, and I've found that much more irritating than anything with FreeBSD. And *that's* with a box that came with WinNT already installed and running, compared to doing a freebsd install from scratch. While I ran into problems with both systems because I was new to them, by the time I worked my way thru those problems on FreeBSD I felt I had learned something and had a better idea of how FreeBSD worked. While I also solved problems under my WinNT install, it was more like winning the lottery. If you try enough things it will eventually work, but I never felt like I was getting "more comfortable" with how the pieces of the system fit together.

Well, I'm determined to not right a book here, so I better head home or I'll just keep writing.

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