On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Markus Baeurle wrote:

> Before thinking about fancy X installers, I would rather like to see things
> fixed which bother me every day like bugs, slow SCSI drivers, broken console,
> no German keymap...

Up until about a week ago I would have agreed with this - but I now feel
that a decent installer is pretty urgent. I installed 1.2-release for an
acquaintance who had given up because they couldn't get it to work. I
managed it - but only because I'd been reading this list for the past few
weeks and knew about other people's problems. 

What perhaps isn't appreciated enough is that a lot of people are
reluctantly giving up on RiscBSD because they can't get it to install.
They can use UNIX, but they haven't the expertise to tackle some of the
problems mentioned on this list. This is a bit tragic IMHO. 

I agree that other things could do with fixing, but I think most people
would rather have a slow/slightly unstable UNIX than no UNIX at all. 

It dosen't have to be an X-based installer, although that would be nice. A
decent text-based program would be fine, as long as it

- worked
- didn't require too much technical knowledge of e.g. disk geometry
- was reasonably robust
- got the system to a stage where it could be booted and would be fully 
operational, requiring no other manual changes.

> The inst script works fine (apart from the bug that it doesn't list /any/ set
> any more because of problems with the new method using awk and all this stuff
> I don't know much about), so it's not top priority to replace it IMHO.
> Don't forget you won't always be able to use an X based installation program.

Yes, I agree. A tidy-up of the current scripts may be all that's required.

I know that writing an installer probably isn't the world's most exciting
project, but doing it would open up RiscBSD to a much wider audience IMHO.
Sadly I lack the necessary skills to do it - but I would be very willing
to help in any way I could. 

Best wishes,

amit