Daemon's Advocate article

Robert Garrett rg70 at sbcglobal.net
Mon Mar 1 13:53:27 PST 2004


Chris Pressey wrote:
On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 15:47:48 +0100
Michel Talon <talon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]
In the same vein the installer is the entrance port to an Operating
System for newbies. If the installer is the sort of crap that are
presently the *BSD installers, you cannot expect to attract a lot of
people outside of the professionals or the enthusiasts. The Linux
people have understood this point: it is the distributions with easy
to use installers (RedHat, Mandrake, Suse) that  have grabbed the
largest part of the market, not the distributions which pretend to
deliver a high quality product, like Debian, and begin by offering an
installer worse than the BSD ones.


In defence of Debian's installer, I didn't think it was *that* bad.  At
the very least, it did have at least the "feel" of being thought-out,
even if it was, let's say confusing.
But FreeBSD?  Here is my impression of what a new user sees when trying
to install FreeBSD for the first time:
ENTER GEOMETRY DON'T ENTER GEOMETRY SLICES PARTITIONS BUT PARTITIONS
AREN'T PARTITIONS ANYMORE STARTING EMERGENCY HOLOGRAPHIC SHELL HAHAHAHA
Fixing this isn't rocket science - but neither is it *computer* science,
and there's the rub.  I personally think DFly's installer should be beta
tested on "non-geek" guinea pigs each release, just for a sanity check
on the jargon etc used in the messages.
-Chris
It will be, it has to pass my wife ...
she woke me up at 4:00 in the morning cuz she couldn't figure out why
she couldn't play a cd..
the speakers where unplugged..

Rob





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