Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Dave Cuthbert <dacut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joshua Coombs wrote:
> Fine, RedHat it is.  No list of mirrors and they
> REALLY want you to install off an ISO... bah.

I don't think it's fair to discard RH from a comparison list just 
because getting an ISO is difficult.  (I've never found it *that* 
difficult, personally.)

I've never had any problem with the RH installer not supporting an 
oddball system configuration (usually along the lines of RAID and 
partitioning), which I think is somewhat amazing.  I have had issues 
with it misdetecting hardware, though.

> Gentoo?  I don't have that kind of time.

I use Gentoo as my main development system at home (I need Linux for 
work); I find it quite nice, though not as nice as BSD's ports.  Yeah, 
compiling everything from scratch is a bit annoying (especially, say, 
XFree86), but this is stuff that I usually let run overnight.  At any 
rate, I've never had dependency problems with portage akin to RPMs.

> In comparison, the brutally crude OpenBSD installer seems simple,
> and efficient.  It reliably gets the job done, as do the installers
> for Net and Free.

I haven't played with OpenBSD at all, and NetBSD only a bit.

IMHO, The most confusing part of FreeBSD's sysinstall is setting up 
partitions and slices.  I never get a good feel as to when it's going to 
commit my changes, especially if I revisit it.  Arguably, paritions, 
slices, and selecting a boot manager should be on the same screen.

There's also the lack of vinum support at this stage, which is 
aggrivating.  I've used vinum; the documentation is better than a lot of 
other projects, but it assumes a deeper understanding of how slices, 
etc., work than most people are comfortable with.  I also had issues 
with the perl script from the HOWTO (?) bombing out.

In the end, I rolled up my sleeves, dug though the documentation and 
bits of the perl script, and ultimately got a very reliable setup going 
on FreeBSD 4.6.  Once it was set up, I found it much easier to manage 
than Linux's RAID tools.  (On Gentoo, a kpanic caused my RAID array to 
fail to start up upon reboot -- this escaped my attention for a good 
couple weeks!)