[Gloucs] February's Presentation - this Tuesday

[Guy Edwards]

On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 18:10, William Roe wrote:
[]
> > As a footnote I'll be wanting to ask some BSD related questions if
> > there's going to be any BSD knowledgable people at the meeting.... I
> > tried installing it today... makes the Debian installer look good in
> > comparison :-) I left it (machine installing FreeBSD) as it started to
> > install a second time (from the net) for no apparent reason.
> 
> I've not installed FreeBSD but OpenBSD was easy, MUCH easier than any
> Linux distro. I expect they are fairly similar though.
> 
> What is the problem?

Maybe I was being unduly harsh. My first installs of Linux (and Windows
long ago) weren't pretty. I needed a install of some flavor of BSD to
try (test) some software on and write an install guide for the software.

The machine I'm installing on is a P133 with 32mb RAM and 1.2Gb HDD
which won't boot from the CD drive (have to make a floppy to point it to
it). I made things worse by not reading any material relating to FreeBSD
other than where to get the floppy images from.

I got to the partitioning bit and it took me a while to realize that you
had to make a partition on the hard drive to then put more partitions
within which seemed strange... 

After that it happily copied all the files to the hard drive from the
net (ftp server), until it started telling me there were no more inodes
left on the hard drive with the same message endlessly scrolling up the
screen. I didn't see any indication of how big the package selections I
was making were and it didn't say "hey you've selected to install 2Gb of
software but you only have a 1.2Gb hdd" or anything like that, it just
merrily filled up the drive.

So I started again but did a minimal install this time so as not to use
up all the hard drive space. This time it finishes installing everything
to the hard drive and I'm put back at the previous menu. I chose a route
out of the menu that seemed correct and it started installing from the
net again. Now that might be normal, I left it installing so I'll see
what it's doing in the morning. I'm quite capable of moronically missing
even the clearest, most obvious information messages but on the other
hand I have been using computers a while and I didn't find the installer
the most intuitive or informative interface ever... If it's not working
in the morning I'll try OpenBSD instead, and if it is working I'll shut
up and stop winging and get on using it :-)

Mark -- I will bring projector tomorrow, takes standard VGA port out/in
and has cables. Will bring screen too.

Guy