I mentioned this a while ago, I'm currently in Berlin visiting my family. With this usually comes PC repair, house repair, car repair, and similar stuff.
My dad has a somewhat older Xeon workstation of mine which is still in pretty good shape except for the Radeon HD6870 which is a Northern Island BARTS ATI graphics card. Funny enough it's older than my Southern Island CAPE VERDE card that I use in Mexico yet more stable...
Well anyways, when I left my family I handed this machine over to my dad and put KDE Neon on it (yeah I know,...) because I didn't have the time back then to update the Hackintosh it was before and I needed something that wasn't too intimidating.
Fast forward I deleted all that crap and chose to give FreeBSD a chance but man, really? Major nuisance to mount devices in general. Seriously, major nuisance. Makes me sad. Gave Funtoo a chance but the live ISO was horrible for me (sorry). It had several bugs right on the live image, not good. I would ideally have this be a fixed release cycle distro but then again most of those are just not acceptable for me anymore for different reasons. So I came back to Eric's Ferrari solution and I just happened to notice:
(Actually the installer got an update pushed yesterday, so I'm not sure what got changed. These observations are from Monday)
My dad has a somewhat older Xeon workstation of mine which is still in pretty good shape except for the Radeon HD6870 which is a Northern Island BARTS ATI graphics card. Funny enough it's older than my Southern Island CAPE VERDE card that I use in Mexico yet more stable...
Well anyways, when I left my family I handed this machine over to my dad and put KDE Neon on it (yeah I know,...) because I didn't have the time back then to update the Hackintosh it was before and I needed something that wasn't too intimidating.
Fast forward I deleted all that crap and chose to give FreeBSD a chance but man, really? Major nuisance to mount devices in general. Seriously, major nuisance. Makes me sad. Gave Funtoo a chance but the live ISO was horrible for me (sorry). It had several bugs right on the live image, not good. I would ideally have this be a fixed release cycle distro but then again most of those are just not acceptable for me anymore for different reasons. So I came back to Eric's Ferrari solution and I just happened to notice:
(Actually the installer got an update pushed yesterday, so I'm not sure what got changed. These observations are from Monday)
- The new installer is awesome, it's visually a new touch to an old software and I literally got from a used FreeBSD disk to a fresh Obarun in a few minutes (kinda, see below)
- Having not seen the installer for a few months this was a good opportunity to experience it as a user from scratch
- It's pretty intuitive even though I have to go through everything myself instead of being guided step by step. I actually prefer this very much over the older curses installers like Debian or FreeBSD
- Something that immediately had my attention in the FreeBSD installer was a wpa_tui prompt to establish a wireless connection right from the installer. That was great user experience to be honest, something that has always bothered me in the Linux world: networking while installing
- First hiccup: The guided partitioning is awesome! BUT: There was no mentioning of whether or not the disk was mounted after the formatting. Since I didn't recall the development phase on this I thought I'd rather exit the script to make sure I have the disk mounted in any case and to my surprise it got mounted by the script. This is really great but it needs a short informational message that this happened
- First bug: Apparently I chose to EFISTUB install, as always, and, again to my surprise, I got asked if I wanted to install microcode. I chose to do so but then there was no further choice to be made. This led me to believe that the script had some logic to find my CPU manufacturer. Something along the lines of lspci | grep "Host bridge" or whatever. Well it turns out the script does nothing at all. It neither downloaded any microcode package nor did it add an initramfs entry to the EFI entry. So I had to rewrite the entry manually afterwards and also chroot to install the microcode package
- Second hiccup: While in chroot I decided to add labels to the partitions, as I always do. This is non-destructive for regular partitions, but as far as my practice goes, Swap space can not get labelled without being recreated. This led to it getting a new UUID and my fresh install not boot after finishing the script. Had to become aware of this and manually edit fstab. This was not at all the fault of the script, just posting this users experience here
- Side note on EFISTUB: resume=UUID=SWAP-UUID could/should(?) be automatically written when Swap was chosen before as one does not consider this a "custom kernel parameter" I'd think. Also the microcode part of initramfs=\amd-ucode.img could/should(?) be put before initramfs=\initramfs-linux.img by the script if microcode was chosen as this also would not be considered a "custom" kernel parameter by most. In both cases maybe another line needs to explain this when prompting for custom parameters: "Do you want to add custom kernel parameters? We already included RESUME and microcode INITRAMFS parameters according to your choices." I hope I explain myself here
- Great work overall. I'm still kinda buffled over how bad most Linux installation experiences still are in reality today. Obarun is not one of them. Way to go!