BLUG meeting follow-up

Back in March I had a talk about package systems on free operating systems. I did not cover all of them, but I guess I at least touched the mostly used ones. This and the next blog posts will be a follow up to that meeting, and today I’ll begin my telling you a bit about upgrading.

As I almost always do when I test a new operating system (except Microsoft) I install the previous stable version just to see how well their upgrading procedure is. Some are good, and some are of course bad. And by bad I mean really bad like Microsoft where the system is almost useless.

Upgrading procedures have grown to be pretty good during the last 3 years when it comes to Linux. BSDs(at least OpenBSD and FreeBSD) haven’t changed their upgrading procedures as far as I know, except some minior details. The whole reason for that is that the BSD’s have seperate base systems. The upgrading procedure for 3rd party applications *have* indeed changed. I remember when I began using FreeBSD and when portupgrade was not available. There was a whole lot of bad hacks to get things up to date, and pkg_version(?) was used to create a sh-script in order to upgrade outdated packages. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think pkgsrc still use some kind of ancestor of that these days.
OpenBSD added the -u option in pkg_add around 3.9 I guess, which made upgrading 3rd party applications way more easy than it was.

Back in those days the only real linux alternative, when it comes to upgrading packages easily, Debian was the only choice. Unfortunately Debian was so hard to install it almost wanted to know in which ISA slot you had your network card, and sound card. But this, as many other things have changed to the better. Not only have Debian had a pretty remarkable change in their installation procedure, but Ubuntu also showed up somewhere in 2004. Ubuntu is supposed to be used by the deadliest of us, and therefore they changed the installation procedure even more. A normal Ubuntu installation is clean, intuitive and nice looking. But I think the installation takes too much time, but thats a problem with almost every distribution. The only exception I know of is Archlinux, which probably have the fastest installation(and upgrading) in the linux world.

What I really miss in Archlinux is the lean and clean way of distributing netboot images as Debian and Ubuntu do. The same can be said about FreeBSD. While both OpenBSD and NetBSD distribute pxe loaders, it seems like getting a pxe installation of FreeBSD is only a myth that SomeBody(tm) got working. Unlike almost anything else in FreeBSD pxe is some of the things that is poorly documented.
Some of the things that I also miss from the BSDs (and some linux distributions) is the lack of USB installation images, at the same time as they distribute floppy disc images. Every BSD and Linux should distribute 1) ISO image 2) USB Image 3) PXE image 4) Floppy image. All of this images should also have a upgrade option.

In the next few days I will post some funny, yet disturbing, info on how much disk space is used before and after a upgrade of a couple of free operating systems using their documentation for how to do a upgrade. And at the same time show you how much disk space is used after a fresh install.