On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 12:07:35AM +0930, David Walker wrote:
> Frustrating.
> I have made maybe 50 phone calls as everytime I try something I have to
> reboot and lose my connection (I have a dual boot with windows). Oh, and I
> don't have a printer so I write all this stuff down.
> I have been trying for 4 days (about 40 hours) to install netbsd and get a
> shell.

Hi David, 

I'd say you're playing under par, if you want one man's opinion. 
That is, you're ahead of the game. The first time I installed NetBSD,
I had another, no, *two* other working boxes on the internet.  (The
NetBSD box became a dial-out gateway).  I had www and printer access,
and an inkling of psuedo experience with unix (I knew what cat and ls
were for).  I doubt I could have gotten as far as you have with one
non-printing box.  

Responding to the question "What would you change about Unix?"
Dennis Ritchie IIRC is famously quoted as answering, "I'd add an 'e' to
'creat'".  No one ever asked me that, but safe to say he has a higher
opinion of vi than I do.  I think even Bill Joy is surprised at its
endurance; I'm surprised it ever got user #2.  But, if you know three
commands and have a reasonably intelligent terminal and don't mind
remembering that <esc> ZZ is "save and exit", it's worth getting to
know well enough to make small changes to .conf files.  It chief
advantage is ubiquity.  Ubiquity and surprise.

Sometimes sysinst (contrary to the docs) does set rc_configured=YES
for you, which makes that first re-boot impressive rather than
mystifying.  I only know that it's happened to me, not why.  

Once you get X going, life gets progressively better.  Personally,
I've never gotten it started with xf86config; I always use the
XF86Setup package.  Make sure you know your hardware, though. 
XFree86's autodetection has a ways to go.  

Since that first boot a year and a half ago, NetBSD has never let me
down.  Gnome has; Netscape has (though not lately), but not the OS. 
When I decide I need to do something, I never seem to be so creative
that someone hasn't done it before; there's seemingly always a
command (often two letters) or package to do the trick. When I started
having problems with the system disk (fsck complaints and such), the
problem turned out to be with the hardware: the disk was getting
flakey.  Not since my VMS days has anthing warned me about a failing
drive.  Some clever guy decided that the built-in cron scripts would
back up stuff in /etc, so when I whacked a bunch of things by
accident, I recovered them.  When someone I'm working with needed an
ethernet trace, there was tcpdump, part of my OS, ready to go to town.
Stuff like that.  No one ever says, "Oh, you should get Norton
Utilities for NetBSD".  Because they would be about as useful as tits
on a bull.  

I don't know what you'll do with NetBSD either, but I know some things
you won't do.  You won't play peekaboo with the device manager to find
what "dmesg|more" will say plainly.  You won't fart around looking for
the latest device driver for your *modem* (what the heck are they
*for*, anyway?)  And you'll spend a lot less time in CompUSA looking
for ways to complete your system.  

I know you didn't ask me about any of this, and can't use any of it,
either.  But if I made you grin a little and/or made you a little
more optimistic about all this time you're
investing/spending/wasting, well, then it was worth my time at least. 

Regards, 

--jkl