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Date:      Tue, 2 Jan 1996 12:24:57 -0800 (PST)
From:      obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu (David E. O'Brien)
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hacker's list)
Subject:   Re: X for install
Message-ID:  <9601022024.AA09773@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu>
In-Reply-To: <v01510100ad0e9f60a0d7@[194.32.164.2]> from "Bob Bishop" at Jan 2, 96 09:33:43 am

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> functionally it'll be neutral at best. More likely it won't run on a wide
> range of hardware and it'll be slow (am I the only person in the world who
> gets pissed off with how long it takes to install Solaris 2?).

No, no, no you aren't.  Why did Sun do that?  What did it buy them?!?  So
much of it still rather "character based".  Gosh I hate that thing.
Everytime I install I get lost in the menus to specify my own partition
setups.  I real pain.  SunOS v4.x.y was easier to me (I never accept
"standard" partitioning).

> people don't install that often anyway. It's simply not worth investing in
> an X-based installation that could at best only deliver cosmetic
> improvements; better use the effort to smooth the functional bumps in the
> existing install over the widest possible range of hardware.

Amem brother.

Case in point.  My step-father wanted to play with Unix after becomming a
budding "power-user" :-) under MS-DOS and MS-Windoz.  He as a Gateway
2000 that came with a Mitsumi (sp?) CDROM drive.  The boot floppy
kernel/sysinstall can install from it (as mcd1 though).  However after
booting the GENERIC kernel it won't reconize his CDROM.  I've hard that
Linux may have handled this better.  I've tried stepping him through
things to get him running, but I'm on the opposite coast from him.  Since
I've never seen one, I can only guess.

Tried the usual is the CDROM drive jumpered for primary/secondary, what
is the IRQ and I/O ports being used, etc.  But it has been hard
investigating the problem.  (we've finally got some email that I think
gives the answer)

If I wasn't running FreeBSD and able to offer suggestions on things to
try, he would have given up on FreeBSD.  Many others with this type of
hardware doesn't have someone else to talk about these problems.

IMHO, it would be better to send time dealing with this type of
installation issues (if time is going to be spent and JHK is interested
in it :-)) than making a pretty X-Windows sysinstall with no added
functionality.

-- David    (obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu)



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