Re: boot banner project

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 02:34:40PM -0500, John Sconiers wrote:
> Several
> years ago after being a FreeBSD fan / contributor since ~1995 I left
> FreeBSD because I didn't have the time with kids and all.  During that
> time I was a unix / storage ps guy for two fortune 500 companies (One
> was a vendor of another Unix OS).  I was also "forced" to work with
> Linux in production settings. I come back ~three years later and on
> the surface things haven't changed.  The boot banner, installation
> program,  etc, etc, hasn't changed.

Personally I find that to be a big plus, not a minus.

One of the reasons I ditched Linux several years ago was the way Linux
shifts constantly. A good example is the firewalling code: once upon a time
there was ipfw. Then that was replaced by ipfwadm. Then that was discarded,
and replaced by ipchains. Which in turn was discarded and replaced by
iptables. (Or was that the other way round? I don't follow it closely these
days)

That's not to say the FreeBSD sysinstall is perfect and couldn't do with a
radical shake-up - it certainly could, as it is the primary administration
interface for a large set of users, and has many problems. But I'd vote for
an overhaul of that rather than a colour boot banner any day.

> I know there have been many
> updates and advanced features added to FreeBSD.

Absolutely. There's really superb stuff which makes the system more powerful
and easier to administer, like the dynamic /dev filesystem and the GEOM
layer.

Would a pretty boot screen make my system easier to administer? Probably
not, and if it didn't work down a serial console then it would be a
retrograde step.

I believe that FreeBSD aims primarily to be a server O/S, not a desktop O/S.
Of course it makes a perfectly good desktop too (as my own desktop and
laptop will testify), but any new feature needs to consider its utility in a
server environment first, I believe.

Regards,

Brian.