Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 18:46:56 -0600 From: dkelly@hiwaay.net To: "John R. Martz" <jrmartz@ibm.net> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux versus FreeBSD??? Message-ID: <199702260046.SAA25087@nexgen.ampr.org> In-Reply-To: Message from "John R. Martz" <jrmartz@ibm.net> of "Tue, 25 Feb 1997 09:06:25 EST." <3.0.1.32.19970225090625.00699f38@pop01.ny.us.ibm.net>
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John R. Martz wrote: > > Since this would not be a production system and would be just the single > PC, maybe Linux makes more sense. But I don't have to rush into this so I > try to actually take some time to think about what I'm doing before doing > it (but just this once ...) I don't know. When I'm playing I hate it worse when things break than when I'm at work. At work I blame management. At home, that's me. Besides, at work they might not need me if everything worked. :-) > One problem is that the ancient 486 box has an IDE controller that won't > support a hard drive larger than around 500MB (currently has one WD 340MB). > And to think it was once a fairly competitive piece of h/w ??? <g> Anyway, > it's a toss up whether I try to just upgrade the controller and hard-drive > or throw in the towel and try to get a new motherboard. New motherboards are fun. And cheap. But I don't think you would have problems running a large IDE HD with FreeBSD on your old MB. I had a 486DX33 with AMI BIOS from about 1991. Apparently it didn't know about my 850M Maxtor but didn't mind having the huge cylinder/sector/heads numbers entered that Maxtor said were to be used. Then FreeBSD worked perfectly. Currently that HD is in a 386SX16 luggable portable (with an even older BIOS) and is used to haul FreeBSD to friend's houses and install (via NFS over ethernet). If you hang around on the FreeBSD lists you'll quickly find out we have a distinct preference for SCSI. As I understand, if your BIOS won't let you enter out of range values in its hard drive description, then you set values that it likes and use the geometry option in FreeBSD's sysinstall to tell FreeBSD the truth. Linux probably has similar support. And once running, neither Linux nor FreeBSD ever make BIOS calls. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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