On 4 Sep 2008, at 12:20 AM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
I haven't finished reading the thread yet, but your assumption is
ignorant. Why do you think FreeBSD is intended solely for desktop
usage? It's not.
I, for one, **only want a command prompt** out of the box. I **do
not**
want Xorg or any X-related garbage on my servers.
Jeremy - read the whole thread first. My assumption is NOT ignorant.
I know that most people want just a command prompt. I myself live in
command prompt mode on FreeBSD most of the time as well. I completely
agree with you that there are many times when I do not want X.org
anywhere around. I get that many people consider FreeBSD a server
OS. I often tell people about how Yahoo and other big sites run on it.
You may be interested to know, however, that some people ALSO use it
as a desktop system. ;-)
This is not trying to force anyone to have Firefox or Xorg. This is
about options in the FreeBSD installer that USED to allow the OPTION
of having X setup for you. This is about OPTIONS to install the
single most widely used kind of software (a web browser) on the system
in a simple, straightforward way.
In the Standard Install there should be an option that says "Install
Firefox & Xorg". It should be an OPTIONAL CHECK BOX, not a mandatory
one, but it should allow a desktop scenario to be setup easily.
If the disks are near full, or need to be uniform across processors,
or whatever, then I am okay with not having all of X and Firefox on
disc1 IF there was a simple set of "pkg_add -r" commands that could
hidden behind a script or dialog which could fetch the necessary
software over the internet and set it up (along with .conf files so X
starts up reasonably well) so that a non-command line user could have
a good first time experience.
It was using Ubuntu that caused me to realize how far behind FreeBSD
is on the desktop side, and how, with a SMALL AMOUNT of work and
changes, it could make a big jump forward by this proposed simple
addition. Heck, if nothing else the installer could simply say in a
help screen, "if you want a web browser on your system, type 'pkg_add -
r firefox' on your system and edit blah blah .conf blah". As it
stands right now, however, there is very little in the install process
which helps a user get X up and going with a browser.
Thanks to everyone else for their comments.
Dan
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