On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Marco Peereboom wrote:

quoted text
> I installed FreeBSD once in my life.  Took me 3 tries and I am sure some
> kittens were murdered in the process.  I am also pretty sure I wept at
> some point.  Honestly I can't remember a much worse installer; maybe SCO
> OpenServer but not by much.

Me too with F'BSD.  A worse installer was present from Redhat,
around Fedora 5, I think (maybe 10 years ago).  It demanded a VGA
monitor, IIRC, among many other sillinesses.

OpenBSD's installation is a breath of cool, clear mountain air.  It
even teaches what "installation" is, if one is attentive.  It's a
definite selling point to me.  It's archaic, thank the gods.

My first OpenBSD installation was 2.x, done by building from a
borrowed SCSI drive laying on the desk on the end of kludged cables,
on a pmax running Ultrix with most of the Ultrix userland unavailable,
it being on a remote afs system.  *IT WENT WITHOUT A HITCH*, including
the X11R5 server. I ran and updated those pmaxes for years, (after
the initial installation, by ftp from an i386 on the LAN), until
the hardware died of old age.  (Anybody need the hockey puck mice?)
I got so I was running Open on an 386sx with no fpx and about 9MB
of memory and something like a 100MB disk.  It wouldn't auto install,
but one could, *knowing what was involved through study of the
pellucid installation script and the short printed document*, do
it with a second host.  (It needed a custom kernel to really save
memory, so I would build that on another host, and make my own
installation floppy with it.)

This sort of experience builds True Believers.

Dave
-- 
        "America ... might become dictatress of the world.
         She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
                    -- John Quincy Adams,  July 4, 1821