RE: FreeBSD

["Paul Sims" <nospam [at] lombard.co.uk>]

I'm glad you like the system. I installed Webmin which made life even 
easier, since it offers a "one stop shop" for web-based system 
administration.

I found the installer tool reasonable - I don't think a comparison with 
dselect is fair, since I didn't actually feel increasingly suicidal when 
using it :))

The partition scheme is basically the same as creating one big extended 
partition and creating the linux partitions inside it. This "slice" 
approach is the same as used by commercial unices like Unixware.

I soon got fed up of sh, I edited the passwd & master.passwd ( I think) 
files to give root /usr/local/bin/bash, and set up all other users to use 
bash when created.

The other pain is that Midnight Commander does not seem to use it's 
internal editor even when the EDITOR environmant variable is not set - 
ManLug's Owen suggested changing VISUAL to affect this but this variable is 
not set either. I like mc (midc on BSD), so this is a particular annoyance.

Good things abound - like nfs connected to my linux box first time, no 
messing.


On Monday, February 21, 2000 4:31 PM, Jose Luis Gomez Dans 
[SMTP:j.l.gomez-dans [at] sheffield.ac.uk] wrote:
> 	Well, in a bout of boredom, I installed FreeBSD on a P200 MMX
> with 32 Megs of RAM and all usual favourites (no SVGA card, but I wasn't
> interested on X anyway). My first impression is a good one. A very good
> one in fact. The installation over the network is _fantatastic_: you
> download *two* files (so you need two floppies) for the kernel and for
> the filesystem. From there onwards, it's all menu driven. It's really
> good to see that the help bits are given for people familiar with linux
> :) ("as opossed to Linux, where you have N partitions, FreeBSD usually 
has one
> with several subdivisions on it blah blah blah"). I also has a package
> selection tool that is very much at the same stage of "black arts" as
> dselect of debian fame, but it installs flawlessly. In fact, I found it
> far more straightforward than RH or Mandrake.
>
> 	Only problems I found:
> 	(i) No bash by default
> 	(ii) No bash by default
> 	(iii) No bash by default
> 	 and a couple more things :)
>
> 	Seriously, I found it a bit awkward to choose a keyboard other
> than the US one, but given that I installed while doing some other stuff
> and trying not to read the documentation (i was trying to work out how
> straightforward it would be for someone with a little experience in
> Linux), and I also found annoying the fact that when you use make to
> download/compile packages, it connects to the main mirror, irrespective
> of it being in Madagascar or Reunion Island. I would have thought you
> can probably change that so that you get a nice close mirror.
>
> 	All in all, a very enjoyable experience. I guess that some linux
> distros could use the ftp knowledge to offer such a flawless network
> install.
>
> 	Regards,
> 	Jose
>
> --
> Jose L Gomez Dans			PhD student
> 					Radar & Communications Group
> 					Department of Electronic Engineering
> 					University of Sheffield UK

"WorldSecure Server <lombard.co.uk>" made the following
 annotations on 02/22/00 11:36:00
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