(no subject)

[fishsupreme]

Anyone who thinks Windows is hard to use has obviously never tried to install OpenBSD. I think it actually has features for the specific purpose of making installation harder.

On the other hand, I'd like to see Windows install over FTP after booting from a floppy.

Comments

[eagle243.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the FTP install is really cool. Apple's Firewire install is also pretty cool. I've never installed any of the free BSD OSes (I have only installed the NeXT versions of BSD) so I can't comment on those, but installing Red Hat Linux is pretty easy. I'm surprised OpenBSD is that much harder.

[fishsupreme]

Really, it just lacks basic user-friendliness features. For instance, you have to enter all the hard drive partition sizes in cylinders and sectors rather than, say, megabytes. It's not so much difficult as arcane -- the process wouldn't be so bad if it had a decent setup app overlayed on it.

On the other hand, I do like the fact that once I finished the basic installation, I could immediately ssh into the machine instead of having to be at console for anything else. Which is good because the console is hooked to a somewhat crappy KVM switch in a room with no chair, whereas I can SSH from the Windows box on my desk.

[eagle243.livejournal.com]

Wow - who even bothers to think in terms of cylinders/sectors nowadays?! Arcane indeed. Yuck.

Slack

[cursed.livejournal.com]

I personally like Slackware a whole bunch. I did run into that problem when configuring my swap file, though. If I had configured it during setup it would have been fairly automatic (that's what I did on my machine). However, configuring it after setup, when I noticed I had created the swap partition but not selected it during setup, sucked balls. Basically I had to figure out how many blocks it was, which nothing really listed, in order to use the mkswap command.

I sympathize with the crappy KVM switch, I have a Belkin KVM that will only let me switch when the machine I want to switch FROM is off or disconnected from the KVM. I'm pretty sure this is not how a KVM is supposed to work.