Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michel Talon wrote:
>As far as i understand, Greg Lehey is mainly nostalgic about his personal
>project in this article, that is vinum. 

I don't see any mention of vinum there: the concrete example he
mentions is an Adaptec RAID controller.

>It is vinum that is left behind by
>recent developments in FreeBSD-5 and soon to be axed if not maintained
>seriously.

Not just vinum: every now and then you see a mail on -CURRENT saying
some device driver or the other is to be axed.  The thing with vinum
is lots of people do use it and depend on it, so axing it would cause
problems.

I haven't used vinum, so can't say how reliable or useful it really
is.  I didn't find much wrong in Greg Lehey's tone in replies on the
lists.

>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.

Lots of distros have tried to attach a good installer to Debian --
Corel, Xandros, Progeny, Lindows -- with acclaimed results but
indifferent market success.  Meanwhile, Red Hat's installer, up until
RH6 or so, wasn't terribly friendly (certainly inferior to FreeBSD's).
I think you have to look elsewhere for the success of certain distros
versus others.

>Remarkably a lot of people
>are taking renewed interest in Debian now that you can easily test it and
>install it from an excellent live cdrom: Knoppix.

Knoppix is really easy to just fire off a CD-ROM drive, but to install
it to the hard drive still takes some technical knowledge (especially
if you need to repartition your windows drive).  But I agree, having
a friendly installer on a fully functional live-cd is a good way to go.

- Rahul