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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