tlug: Unhelpful installation

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

>Darren - you mentioned earlier that you were unimpressed with the ease of
the RH
>installation  - were you refering to the lack of info on partition sizes -
that
>...
>When installing FreeBSD, besides manual partitioning, there is an "auto"
>partition option which partions your hard drive into four generically sized

My main problems were the lack of these "auto" options, and also the lack
of context-sensitive help. Once I know what I'm doing I might want to be
more in control, but for a first install I don't really care because I
don't have the experience to make an intelligent decision.

On just about every screen I was desperately looking for a way to say "I
don't know, what would you recommend?" or "I don't care, I'll have whatever
is normal".

Another nice thing BSD has is the adduser command brings up a series of
prompts, where I can just press Return to accept their suggested default.
When I tried that on Linux it gives me a load of command switches. "man
adduser" is a reference manual and just confused me more.

"adduser darren" works, but it didn't work when I tried to log on. "adduser
-p mypw darren" also 'works', but again I couldn't log on.

For anyone out there trying to add their first non-root user here's the
'secret':
  adduser darren
  passwd darren   (then it prompts you for your password).
 

The hard-liners on this list might tease me for thinking like a Windows
user, and feel that wanting to install something without having to plough
through readme's/books first is immoral and disgusting. But I'm not
suggesting taking away the option to have fine control of everything. I'm
suggesting adding something to the installation for first-time users that
makes a lot of the decisions for them (probably sub-optimally, but Windows
users are used to that and don't really care).


Some more specific comments:
1.It refers to "mount points" when partioning. I had no idea what that was,
so left it blank. I then get an error that says my mount point must start
with /. Eh?! So finally I guessed it was jargon for "What would you like to
be the base directory for this partition?"

2.It didn't format the main ext2 partition - I missed checking a checkbox.
Then a few screens later I get an error that looked completely unrelated,
and the only choices were "try again" and "go back". So after a few retry's
I kept going back and back looking for something unusual. An option to
suggest common causes of this error message, and how to cure each, would
have been nice.

3.A "suspend installation while I reboot and find out what graphics card I
have" option would have been nice. And more auto-probing options - there is
SuperProbe you can use once you've installed, but why doesn't it give me
the chance to run this when it's asking me the graphics card question?

Darren


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