Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 22:45:57 -0700 (PDT) From: John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@efn.org> To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: installation program for 0412-SNAP Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.91.950510223225.194A-100000@unix>
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well... I just thought you guys would like to know what I thought of the install program... just a little background... I installed 1.1.5.1 about 6 months before 2.0 was released... I didn't imediately upgrade because I didn't want to risk my hard drive... once my hard drive crashed (lost disklable and didn't know better) I decided to install 2.0... it was ok... but I didn't particually like the installtion... now for the heart of the matter... there should be a intermediate installation that doesn't limit you... I was going to mount my /, /usr, /games, and /programming . only the last two I could preserve... this is number one... there should be a way to preserve the contents of a drive... maybe mounting the drive then clearing the directories like /etc, /var, and others... that way you can actually preserve some of the data on them... then I go to add /usr... well... I can't preserve that and that is my main partion... right now it is 550 megs... it has the home directories, my file archives (including FreeBSD), X and other stuff... now the installation wants to newfs that... so I think... ok... why don't I just not mount it... and afterward mount it... so I go to proceed with my swap, /, /programming, and /games assigned... well... my / is only 47megs and it won't let me past to install without assigning /usr... what's up??? can't I make my own descisions... sure you can have the warning but don't force it on you... sure I probably couldn't install the bindist on just the /... but I could skip the installation of the bindist... reboot off the hard drive... manually mount /usr... and then install the bindist after possibly cleaning /usr/bin, etc... I personally liked the old installation much better... the only installation took less time... was a little more experience friendly... it also forced along some routes but didn't on some of the more important ones... what I would like to see is the ability to do an intermediate installation... one that the user isn't a FreeBSD hacker and happens to sup current... or an idiot that doesn't know a hard disk from a floppy disk... one that does know the system ok... knows how to mount the disks... disklabel them manually... modify the fstab... among other capbilities... right now the installation is almost TOO idiot proof... people like me whoo kinda know the system but don't know how to go about manually installing the whole new system are basicly dead in the water... we can't upgrade because the install wants to newfs all our valuable data... and we can't just get the basic /bin, /sbin, kernel, and bootblocks installed so we can install the bindist by hand... I hope you understand what I said... and hope that the changes can be made by the 2.1 RELEASE... TTYL... John-Mark gurney_j@efn.org Live in Peace, destroy Micro$oft, support free software, run FreeBSD (unix)
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