Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 12:15:15 +1100 (EST) From: Richard Lyon <rlyon@oznet07.ozemail.com.au> To: Ronald Darden <rdarden@phoenix.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: installation difficulty Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970301114004.203A-100000@rlyon.mynet.au> In-Reply-To: <3315B20E.6C82@phoenix.net>
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On Thu, 27 Feb 1997, Ronald Darden wrote: > I very much appreciate your philosophy, HOWEVER, .... > > Installation of FreeBSD is next to impossible unless one is already in > a Unix environment with ALREADY configured ftp, or one BUYS the CD. > WHAT?? I'm in the middle of installing FBSD2.1.7 now. I have WINNT installed on my machine. FBSD is going on a second drive. The installation steps have been as follows: 1. Using WINNT I have downloaded the floppies, bin, info, manpages and doc. 2. Running rawrite2 from WINNT I created the boot and fixit floppies. 3. Copied the distribution tarballs to 1.44M floppies. Some care is required with the placement of the inf files. This was explained in the freebsd-questions mail in the last two weeks. I want backups on floppy just in case I want to do a re-install. 4. New IDE drive was installed. FBSD 2.1.7 was installed with absolutely no problems. 5. After reading various manual pages, FBSD was configured for my own personal preferences. User PPP setup to dial my ISP. Does linux have a similar package?? I wish I could use something similar for DEBIAN. 6. GMAKE, MTOOLS, POPCLIENT and PINE ports compiled and installed. 7. Currently FTPing XFREE and reading my mail. Total install time so far 6 hours including download time. I have installed previous versions of FBSD, but FBSD had enough new features to require me to printout the install.txt file and carefully read it. I am impressed by how easy and quick it is to install FBSD. The main thing is not to do any install step until I clearly understand what is going to happen. > It would be nice if there were easy to use instructions how to install > from a DOS partition, especially the packages. > > Maybe sample configuration files for ftp in FreeBSD, or just WHERE to > put packages in DOS so that the installation will actually find them. > Some foresight is require during the installation. You must note the drive and partition names down when defining the partitions at the start of installation. Personally I am wary of trying to install from a DOS partition. If I do something wrong maybe there is a chance I will cook the partition and lose all the files I have downloaded. > How do you expect any sane (oxymoron) Windows-user to WANT to migrate > to Unix under these circumstances? > > Rather than learning anything, I feel that I'm working in the dark, > even reading the handbook. > > WHY ISN'T A SIMPLE HTML BROWSER INCLUDED SO THAT ONE CAN READ THE > DOCUMENTATION? > You can get a text version to read with VI. I certainly don't want to download something like Lynx. It costs me money to do this. > Lynx can't be obtained except one ftp in the FreeBSD environment, but > that's not possible unless one can configure the dialer. > > Installing from DOS can't find the packages index. > > In other words, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE. > > How does one even know how to acces the floppies? > > It took me several installations just to get XFree to recognize my > mouse, and even now I can"t get the #$%^@& thing to start up except in > some strange video resolution. Installing X requires knowledge of your hardware. But I am no expert and everything seems to be going OK. You must read the documentation and map out an installation plan. Curious about the mouse. I have a standard microsoft mouse connected to com1. This was configured during the installation with no problems. > In short, your installation s$%^s! > By what standards are you making this judgement? Do you expect free software to compete against an installation procedure which cost millions of dollars to construct? FBSD is not microsoft. Anyway enough of this, its time to download lestiff so I can setup MWM. Regards ....
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