Subject: Ease of installation (was: Nice to see NetBSD mentioned. However...)
To: Richard Rauch <rauch@eecs.ukans.edu>
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 01/08/2001 11:17:32
On Sunday, 7 January 2001 at 11:08:55 -0600, Richard Rauch wrote:
> I haven't used the FreeBSD installer. I do know that when I was
> installing Debian GNU/LINUX, their current approach annoyed me.
Well, I've installed just about every kind of UNIX-like operating
system available for i386 at some time or another. Here's my take,
which of course has to be somewhat biased. From best to worst,
1. FreeBSD. This wouldn't have something to do with the fact that I
do it all the time, and could now do it in my sleep, would it? Of
course it would. The FreeBSD project recognized about 5 years ago
that sysinstall was broke, and that it would be better to replace
it than to fix it. So we stopped applying all except bandaid
fixes. As a result, it's a mess. Go into the "select
distributions" menu, move the cursor to "All" and press Enter.
What do you get? You go back to the parent menu, and it's not
until you come to commit that you discover you haven't selected
anything. You should have pressed "space", not "Enter".
Still, the current version of sysinstall allows you to do almost
everything to set up a working system, including installing
packages and configuring X. It could be a lot worse.
2. NetBSD. The install program doesn't look as sexy as FreeBSD, but
it works well, and it's fast. There's a good reason for it being
fast: it leaves you with a half-configured system. [Caveat: This
was with 1.4-RELEASE about 1½ years ago. It could have changed
since.
3. OpenBSD. I tried installing 2.6-RELEASE at the same time I did
NetBSD. It's pretty similar, but I was installing a shared system
on my laptop, and before committing it showed every indication of
wanting to ignore my requests and use the whole disk. I later
installed on another, dedicated disk, and it worked fine.
4. RedHat Linux 7.0. This worked better with the hardware I have
than any other Linux installation. I still had to tell it what my
Ethernet board was, where all BSDs found it with no trouble at
all. The fact that I put this one so high was because I had
already been through the pain described below with Debian.
5. Debian Linux (any release). It took me four separate attempts to
get the *(&*( to recognize my Ethernet board. A number of Linux
experts (real experts, not self-styled ones) helped me in the
process. There seems to be no standard way to probe and recognize
an Ethernet board in Linux, you need to know which driver to use,
or try each in sequence.
Apart from that, Debian's packaging system is terrible. After 4
months of messing around with it, I discovered that I didn't have
Netscrape on the machine, and that I needed it for comparison with
FreeBSD. I found Netscrape on the CDs, but the installation
procedure insisted on changing libc as part of the installation.
Sorry, I can't understand that. That's when I moved the box to
RedHat.
6. BSD/OS. The installation program itself was OK, but it couldn't
support most of the hardware on the laptop I was installing on.
7. UnixWare. Couldn't finish installing on a multiboot machine
before panicing. Took forever. In the process, it renumbered the
partitions in the partition table, making FreeBSD unbootable until
I changed /etc/fstab. I finally got it installed, but it took
about 2 days.
I've also installed Open Desktop and XENIX, but that was a while ago.
They were even more painful.
Greg
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