Daemon's Advocate article

[Chris Pressey]

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