Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 28 Jul 2004 20:10:10 +0300
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To:        DK <asdzxc111@yahoo.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: BigApache for Windows - Why doesn't BSD have an installer package like this ???
Message-ID:  <20040728171010.GA86397@orion.daedalusnetworks.priv>
In-Reply-To: <20040728142817.77917.qmail@web41011.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <41079361.50409@elvandar.org> <20040728142817.77917.qmail@web41011.mail.yahoo.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 2004-07-28 07:28, DK <asdzxc111@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Remko Lodder <remko@elvandar.org> wrote:
> > > eg: ONE Package(NOT an array of messy Ports)
> >
> > It works absolutly fine, i dont think we want one big package for
> > everything, then it would be like rpm and FreeBSD imo does not want to
> > follow Redhat and such. Oh and that requires a lot of disks for
> > installing, Suse anyone? (DVD or six seven CD's?).
>
> 6 CD's for what ??? An OS with a FAST GUI/File Manager/FindFiles/Editor + Web Server
> ... more like 350MB ;) then add 250MB for Office :))

That's the route some Linux distributions have been going down.

Please, bear in mind while your're trying to set up FreeBSD, that
FreeBSD is thankfully not like these Linux distributions.  It's not even
a Linux distribution at all, but a BSD system.

> > As said, read the documentation , or learn to search, since if you did
> > that and installd apache with modssl included. And you would have
> > searched you would have come across mod_perl and even mod_php, which is
> > apxs'ed into the apache library stuff and can be used within 'seconds'.
>
> whats apxs'ed short for ??

Apache server extensions that do not need to be linked to your Web
server at build time, but can be loaded at run-time as modules.

> Refreshing the system without a reboot is a Priority in front of
> Automount ?? nice one developers...

> & windows 2000 doesn't have a nice SMP ... that's news to my DUAL 1
> Ghz Pentium III system at home I use as a workstation

I don't know about that.  I've only worked with non-SMP systems so far.
Perhaps Remko was overreacting to your overreaction ;-)

> .. I know its hard for people to swallow, but MS Windows IS easier to
> use than BSD/Linux/OSX ...  thats WHY its the most widely
> used.... regardless of marketing/costs etc ...

Yes, I know.  Windows is easier.  Thanks, I won't buy!

Do you want to come at home and explain what is easy about Windows to my
sister who's been fighting with DVD playback on Windows XP for more than
a month now, who wasted precious exam-period time to troubleshoot and
solve Powerpoint and Word problems?

> Gnome starts faster than Windows ?? Start time is not important - I am
> talking about reaction time of the GUI - Menu's apearing, moving
> icons, applications appearing etc -

Start-time *IS* important and I don't know why you want to present it
like something totally unimportant.  Perhaps because it suits your
bragging about the "speed" of Windows?  I'm not sure :-(

Reaction-time that you mention above is something that depends on a lot
of subjective factors, on the themes you have selected, on the load of
the machine at the time and a host of other things.  Can you describe
the setup of the machine at the time you measured this "reaction time"
that bothered you and the tests you did to measure it?

> Working with Fedora at Uni (Yes, I am doing a Masters) the other day,
> its on a 50 Node Cluster - Its running on systems faster than what I
> have at home(above), yet feels like its as gluggy as Windows 95! -
> nice one Linux

FreeBSD is not Linux.  Sorry, you'd have to complain to the Fedora
people for any problems you have with their slow monster of an
RPM-beast.

Yes, I hate working on Fedora too, and I avoid it like hell.  But that
has nothing to do with the way FreeBSD works or what it can do :)

> As for XFCE, how do you start it from the .xinitrc The XFCE Homepage
> site says "exec startxfce4" - but that didn't work for me ??

The X11 desktop is described in detail in "The X Window System", a
chapter of the FreeBSD Handbook.  This chapter contains a lot of useful
information for people who are new to X11.  Please do read it.

There is even a section in that chapter that describes XFCE4 and the
steps that you need to take to install it and start it.  I'm sure you'll
find it very helpful.

As usual, if you have comments, suggestions or complaints about the
document, you can always contact the FreeBSD Documentation Team as
described in the bottom of every documentation page.

Point your favorite browser to

    http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11.html

and happy reading :-)

> Whats the purpose of having to manually set the system to automount ??
> as opposed to having it as a system install default ?? if there is an
> advantage, I am sure its for the 0.01% of the user base

It's more in the range of 99.9%.  Automounting can be annoying like hell
when you happen to accidentally insert media in your drives.  It can
also be insecure if you don't want anyone to use the machine you've
installed to mount CD-ROMs, floppies or other media of their choise.

Instead of leaving *all* the users exposed to risks like this, which is
the usual Windows philosophy of doing stuff, FreeBSD has the capability
to automount media but keeps it disabled by default.

Is it so hard to edit a text file like rc.conf and add a simple line
like this?

        amd_enable="YES"

Do you really mean that this is so much harder to do than fumble and
fight with multiple dialogs, which you have to remember by heart of
course, just to find that disabling automounting is impossible (unless
you download TweakMyRegistry version 95.3.2000.13.27 paying careful
attention to the version numbers because the wrong version can mess up
your entire system with a single click)?

I somehow doubt it ;-)

> - sorry, I wasn't clear above - For the lack of a GUI Find Files
> option, I meant the default install or with Window Managers(wmaker),
> not the Desktop Environments like KDE/Gnome(which are also
> fast... NOT) - which I don't use as they are slow

As I wrote before, there's always "find".

> - installable YES, configurable ... you've got to be shitting me :o

Not really.  But even if we provided examples of this configurability
you wouldn't accept them as valid examples because they wouldn't be
point and click on some wimpy dialog-based wizard, right?

> - start the GUI - oops some doc reading here(easy+1)

> - while in wmaker, dynamically change the Montior settings from
> 1600x1200 32b to 1028x768 24b (wouldn't have a clue - off to the docs
> - manually edit configuration files ?? - then restart - but what is
> the correct horizontal frequency OR vertical refresh(hard++) - I don't
> know & I don't want to know(hey while I am at it, why don't I start
> designing my own CPU)... that's why people use Windows(easy to
> configure)

You don't really need to know or provide all of these details.  I just
updated my system to use X.org the new X11 ports of FreeBSD from XFree86
4.3 that I used to have before.

Running the xorgcfg utility that the documentation of X.org mentions and
running it only *once* I generated an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that was
essentially the same as the one I had before.  So I went ahead and
deleted the new X11 configuration file.

Surprise!  The new X11 servers worked like a charm with my old config.
Which doesn't specify a refresh rate, mind you!

> I played with BSD back in 1997 & thought it needed some work.. so I
> gave it a miss..  Fast Forward to 2004, & all I see are developers
> adding features that are not that important, yet missing the basics of
> what the majority of USER's want(not coders)

This statement is just too general to even attempt to reply to.

> ...XPde seem to have the right idea... looks promising... hope the GUI
> reaction time is fast

I'll ask yet one more time.  Are you sure that XPde is faster than, say,
windowmaker running with a simple theme?  Or are you saying this just
because it catters to your need to "look" at something that resembles
Windows XP because you're afraid of changing the way you think about a
desktop?

> that reminds me of my Java Lecturer (I hate Java BTW) in which every
> time students had a problem, he would never look at the code but just
> reply "check out the java docs.. its all in there" ...  yea right ...

One of the features of Open Source projects that keep them apart from
the commercial world of Windows is exactly this sort of thing: it's all
in the documentation.  We don't need to hide anything from you to
protect our intellectual "property" or "assets".

I'm not sure why you're saying "yea right" above :-/

> Benchmarks - How about FreeBSD+wmaker(GUI) & Windows 2000 installed on
> EXACTLY the same box.  Any person standing next to me could see which
> is faster
> Windows 2000 GUI - Much faster than Wmaker
> Loading/Using Notepad/Wordpad - Much faster than Nedit
> Windows Explorer - Heaps faster than xfe

Windows 2000 GUI is faster than windowmaker?  Now that's news.

I've seen this "fast" 2000 GUI crawl almost to a halt because someone
else is copying a large directory tree over the network.  I've also seen
windowmaker fly on a Pentium 200 with 64 MB of RAM while I was updating
a huge checkout from a CVS server, over the network too.

Are you sure there's nothing wrong with your BSD setup?

You should also note than nedit is not the "Notepad" of X11.  The
features of Nedit are much much better and innumerable compared to the
lack of features of Notepad.  Highlighting, configurable TAB size,
wrapping and block-mode editing are just a few that I remember now.
Even if nedit takes 1 second more than Notepad to load, its wealth of
features is more than ample reward to me.  If you want to compare
Notepad to an X11 editor, you should probably compare it to 'xedit' and
that would probably be an insult to the features of xedit ;-)

I won't comment on the Windows Explorer stuff because your postings to
the list start looking like a troll attempt, since you haven't provided
any details on the setup of your BSD system but keep dismissing all the
efforts of mine and others to help you set it up and configure it as
irrelevant "because BSD sucks so much when compared to Windows".

> There is nothing wrong with the docs regarding installing/using BSD -
> docs are fine :)

But you haven't provided any solid proof of having read any of it,
except a single URL in one of your posts that wasn't even one of the
documents at www.FreeBSD.org :-/

> In the year 2004, I refuse to spend my time coding in front of a
> screen hacking in "cmd line syntax".. hey thats just me!

Then it is possible that BSD is not for you.  You seem to be fixed in
your ways and solid as a rock in refusing anything that is not Windows.

Sorry, but we can't help you with that.

Giorgos



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040728171010.GA86397>