Re: need help choosing appropriate BSD distro

On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:55:50 +0000 (UTC), espie@xxxxxxxxx (Marc Espie)
wrote:

The `official' full CD is sold. It's fairly easy to rebuild something similar
from the provided files, though just read the instructions.

As I mentioned, I'm not comfortable with the instructions on the web
site--I have looked them over already, feel that it's vague in some
places or I don't understand what it's telling me to do, so I really
don't want to go that route.

My requirement for an OS is that it should at least install without
much tinkering. Customizing it to work better, installing programs,
etc., would of course need to be done, but if I need to hack or
tinker, I'll hack or tinker with Linux since I have a fair amount of
time invested in that OS already. I'll leave the hacking and
tinkering, compiling, etc. to the more experienced people who have the
time to do the research and don't require that the OS work right "out
of the box" and have an installation CD image available. There are
plenty of more capable people out there that can work with things that
aren't they way they need them to be out of the box.

Don't get me wrong, here--I have read a lot on Linux, much of the
Linux documentation project docs in book format and most of the Ubuntu
Linux Bible, both very thick books. I don't want to invest the time in
something that I suspect might lead me to a dead and still not meet my
requirements for an OS. Ubuntu Linux already does, at least on my
desktop PC.

I'm just trying to see if BSD is ready for prime time, and maybe a
couple branches of it are there or are close (like Ubuntu is with
Linux, but definitely not ready for the masses yet!), but I haven't
tried enough of them to give up yet. I'd like to give BSD a fair
chance before giving up on it. And one of the BSDs recognizes my
wireless card and Agent runs under Wine on it, I would be willing to
learn more at that point in time.


It's often not necessary to create a full CD to install, provided you have
net access. In fact, with modern machines, if you have access to a box that
can act as tftp, just netboot.

You're way over my head with the last few terms, but the net access
would be on the Ubuntu PC (or XP if I boot to it instead here). The
laptop doesn't have a burner and I don't have things set up to easily
share files between it and the desktop computer, so it wouldn't be
able to connect and get files from here if that's what you're
suggesting. There are problems that the help forums haven't been able
to figure out (I do have printer sharing working, though).

If instead you are suggesting to install a small version of a BSD
branch on the laptop, get net access, then download something from
there, I do have one option if my wireless card is not supported--I
have a USB Ethernet adapter and an extra cable to go to the router.
But I don't want to be stuck with using that as it doesn't meet my
requirements for portability.

I can FTP but never used something called TFTP, nor netboot. If
netboot requires the laptop to be network connected then it's a
catch-22 situation. I have network access in Windows 98 on the laptop.
I have a 4 GB partition with PC-BSD on it that I will wipe out soon
since it doesn't support my network card. I'm not sure how to get
something on the partition without using an installation CD.

Again, if it's that complicated, maybe I'll just try a different
branch of BSD that has a working install CD iso available. If there's
a step-by-step procedure that doesn't take hours of research to figure
out (and there are some poorly-written how-to's out there!), I can
take a look at it and consider if it's worth trying. But if Open BSD
is really based on another branch of BSD, the other one would probably
be as likely to support my hardware, shouldn't it? And if that other
one has an install iso CD image, I can try that out instead.

A newer laptop is in my future (not sure when, though), and that
should give me the ability to run Ubuntu Linux on it and have Wine
working as it does on the desktop PC (hopefully, at least!). I can
wait if necessary.
.

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