Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 12:51:48 (CST) From: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) To: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Org) Cc: lets@lets.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) Subject: FreeBSD Installation Difficulties - Part 2.2 Message-ID: <9501161851.AA50101@risc.austin.ibm.com>
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Hi Jordan, ) This note was originally sent 5 Jan 95. No response was received, so I'm ) resending it assuming it was lost in the mail. I've made some more ) installation attempts and learned a few things since 5 Jan, so I've ) modified this note a bit from the 5 Jan note. Thanks for all the information you gave me in response to my first note on Tuesday. That was a great help, and I was able to finish the initial installation! Now I have a few more questions and one piece of information for you. First, I'll give my machine description again as background. My machine is a 486DX2/66 with 16MB, a 1.44MB diskette drive, and 2 hard disks, a WD 2340 and a WD 2540. It is a clone that IBM manufactures for resale by another company. It has an AT bus, an SVGA display (CTX), and a CD drive that appears to me to be generic (if there is such a thing). The CD drive has its own card, that is it's not SCSI and it's not plugged into my Sound Blaster 16 card. Hard disk 0 (325MB) has 2 partitions, a DOS primary of 200MB with IBM DOS 6.1 and a DOS extended partition of 124MB with OS/2 WARP. DOS is on drive C: and OS/2 is on drive D:. There's also a 1MB thing (partition?) that has the OS/2 boot manager that allows me to select DOS or OS/2. Hard disk 1 (516MB) also has 2 partitions, the first of which is a DOS extended partition of 153MB which is drive letter E:. The 2 partitions on disk 0 and this first one on disk 1 were made with the DOS FDISK. The second partition on disk 1 is a FreeBSD slice made with the FreeBSD Fdisk. The FreeBSD slice has 350MB which brings it up to the 1024 cylinder limit. The remaining 12MB are unused as I believe they must be. - Is it true that if I were to devote an entire hard disk to FreeBSD (i.e., no DOS partition) then I could use all of its space, beyond the 1023 cylinder (?) limit? I have an opportunity to get a 1.2 gig or so disk in which case I would remove my smaller disk, move DOS and OS/2 to the 540MB and put FreeBSD on the 1.2 gig, but I only want to do this if I can use the whole disk. > You can copy the bindist directory to your C: drive (copy it whole, > directory and all contents) and select `DOS' installation when asked. > This will work fine, as long as you're using your C drive. This worked great. I did it by making the DOS partition on my second disk a primary, temporarily. I installed bindist, manpages, games, and tools successfully this way. However, X would not install. On the others, I got a prompt asking for the device. I gave it wd1h and it worked. But, for X, no prompt ever came. It just said "Unable to cd to /mnt/XFree86-3.1 directory" and went back to the "what do you want to install" screen. I'm going to try it again tonight with a fresh copy of the X directory. ((I did and it failed again.)) - From this general description, do you know why bindist, manpages, etc. would install but X would not? That is, is there something special or different about the X installation? - How do I install X? - To try the install of X again, I would login under my user id (?), su to root (?), and run /sbin/sysinstall? ((I tried this and it seemed to me that the only option given was to start all over again. Is this true?)) When I partitioned the FreeBSD slice with Disklabel, I specified partitions for "/", swap, "/usr", and "/usr/users". I made their sizes 20MB, 40MB, 200MB, and 90MB, respectively. I thought that the installation instructions said that the "/usr/users" was for the users' files. On the unix system I'm familiar with, it would be "/home", but I knew there would be differences and I thought this was one of them. However, after installation, I see that there is a "/home" so I think I misunderstood the instructions. - On FreeBSD, are the users' home directories put under "/home"? To make a 90MB partition for the users' files should I have make a "/home" partition with Disklabel instead of a "/usr/users"? What's the "/usr/users"? After I had installed everything I could and exited the "what do you want to install" screen, I was given the opportunity to create a user. I opted to do so, specified a user name of "lets" and was asked what group to use. Now I only have unix experience on one system and on that system the group of choice is "system" which gives the user privileges just below root. So I specified "system" for the group for "lets". This turned out to be a bad choice. Then install asked me what to use for a default shell. Again, I'm only familiar with one shell, the Korn shell, so I said "/bin/ksh". Install said it didn't have that one and would default "lets" to "/bin/sh". This turned out to be not true, I think. The shell that "lets" got was not "/bin/sh" but rather "/bin/csh". There seem to be only two shells on FreeBSD, csh and sh. When I executed "/bin/sh", I got the familiar "$" prompt. However "/bin/sh" doesn't seem to be the Bourne shell (which "/bin/sh" is on the system I use at work). Thinking back, I believe I read it's something called POSIX shell. - Is it true that install will say it's giving "/bin/sh" but actually gives "/bin/ksh"? - Are csh and sh the only shells available? - Is sh the POSIX shell? What's the POSIX shell? A colleague tells me that the Korn shell is a superset of the Bourne shell and that the POSIX shell is also a superset of Bourne and has some, but not all, of Korn. He also says that the Born Again shell is a superset of Korn and POSIX. Any of this true? > > - If I keep my DOS partition on disk 1 as an extended DOS partition, > > will I be able to mount it under FreeBSD? If so, how? > > You'll need to edit your disklabel and try to bump the starting location > forward by secs/track number of blocks. This is kludge, but for now we > don't have native support for DOS extended partitions, sorry! - Are you saying that it is possible to mount a DOS extended partition by making some sort of change with Disklabel? If so, can you tell me more about this change? What does "bump the starting location forward by secs/track number of blocks" mean? Is this documented somewhere? I'd like very much to be able to keep my DOS partition as an extended partition. > > The hard disk reboot went well at first. My first prompt, from the boot > > manager was: > > > > F2 ... dos > > F3 ... OS2 > > F5 ... disk 2 > > > > Default: F? > > > > - Why does the boot manager call it disk 2 when unix calls it disk 1 > > (wd1)? > > F5 *leads* you to disk2. You're currently looking at disk1. If you hit > F5, you'll see a boot menu item for disk1 leading back. This was a question about consistency. What I meant was that unix names the disks "0" and "1", FreeBSD on my system calls them "wd0" and "wd1", FreeBSD Fdisk and Disklabel refer to them as "0" and "1", in other words, everything I've come across so far uses zero origin numbering except the FreeBSD boot manager which calls them "disk 1" and "disk 2". Shouldn't BM be consistent and call them "disk 0" and "disk 1"? > > I'd also like to ask a few things about the boot manager. > > > > - Did I do any damage when I accidently did a Write MBR in FreeBSD Fdisk on > > disk 0? Was anything written anywhere by this? Maybe I was supposed to > > do a Write MBR on disk 0? > > I don't think so. On my second and successful attempt at installation I did the Write MBR incrementally to see if I could answer this question. What I found is that I did, in fact, need to do a Write MBR in FreeBSD Fdisk on both disks explicitly. When I did a Write MBR on the 2nd disk and not the 1st, the machine boot did not see the FreeBSD boot manager - it went into the OS/2 boot manager. > > My guess on this is that there is a boot record (my term) at the beginning > > of (one or each) disk that sends the boot to code in a disk partition and > > that the FreeBSD boot manager is in the FreeBSD slice. Then the FreeBSD > > boot manager is able to branch to any other partition on any disk and it > > happens that the OS/2 boot manager is in it's own partition on disk 0. > > You need to read the Tutorial.. :-) It talks about all of this. - Where's the Tutorial? I read all I could find in mosaic, read the questions and announce news groups, and all the files the installation presented to me. Is this Tutorial in one of the directories on the installation CD? Thank you again for taking the time to read and answer these questions. Despite the obstacles, I'm already having fun running unix commands in the limited environment I have so far. And I'm really looking forward to getting X up and connecting with the outside world. Richard Letsinger ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Letsinger | Austin, TX 78758 | e-mail: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Required disclaimer: This note is from me and is independent of IBM. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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