Re: BootBlocks.

["Pieter Dumon" <pieter.dumon@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/3/06, talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > And don't forget the BSD besides Desktop BSD don't state as goal
> > to conquer the Desktop of peoples grandmothers.
> > And especially DragonFly aims at Cluster and performance.
>
> I understand that. I am also extremely sceptic on the interest of
> the cluster stuff

Well, there's a lot of different cluster types of course, but I can
give an example of a possible userbase that would be very interested:
We have a small cluster for scientific computing (long and short
running calculations), currently running Gentoo Linux with openMOSIX.
Not that we think of moving to another OS in the near future, but it
definitely is an example of an interested userbase: running a
collection of relatively cheap machines seamlessly, with an "it just
works" philosophy would be great. (it isn't "seamless" currently, as
for instance openmosix doesn't very well support threading)

> but let us say i am uninformed. Knowing a certain number
> of so-called "computer professionals" i am quite convinced they dont want
> to read hundred pages more than your proverbial grandmother.

hmm. Still, if you compare the /etc clutter of some Linux Distro's
with the cleanlyness of the *BSDs, the BSDs are definitely doing
better and lend themselves better for self-explaining configuration.
If you point the users to "man rc.conf" and so on....

As for docs, I actually like the Handbook very much. If it were
accompanied by more HowTos or short guides... (But I'd say we'd better
help with that instead of talking about it here :-))
As for style, I'd like to refer too the Gentoo Linux docs:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml
They are really great. Although the page may seem a bit cluttered,
there are seperate guides for specific points ("How do I install and
configure ...?"). (Notice that Gentoo is quite BSD-ish in its package
system and /etc, and some subproject is even planning on porting the
package system to DFly).
Still, I don't know what I like better, probably the "all-in-one" DFly Handbook