Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 06:17:13 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Org), lets@lets.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installation Difficulties - Part 2.2 Message-ID: <17571.790352233@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 16 Jan 95 12:51:48." <9501161851.AA50101@risc.austin.ibm.com>
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> - 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 devote the entire disk to FreeBSD or you can run it untranslated and simply make sure that DOS & OS/2 live below cylinder 1024 and that FreeBSD's partition *starts* well below 1024. Once FreeBSD is up, it can access all cylinders. The way I usually do it is something like this: Assuming that you've got, say, a 2.1GB disk with 3047 cyls. The allocation map might look like this: DOS: cyl 1-500 OS/2: cyl 501-1000 BSD: cyl 1001-3047 Both DOS and OS/2 are happy since they've got direct access to their partitions with nothing exceeding cyl 1024, and FreeBSD starts enough below 1024 that it's able to use the BIOS to get the kernel loaded in and then can use its own less limited device driver to talk to the entire disk. You can also run all of them translated, but with disks this large it's still a bad idea - FreeBSD's install does not yet give you the option of changing the paramters to newfs, and it gets upset when installing on large cylinder-size partitions (I think it should just pick nice defaults, myself, but...) > 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 That's because DOS name mangling has changed the names on your disk! :-( You'll have to make a tree of symlinks pointing into the DOS partition using the original names, or soemthing. The XFree86 distribution was never done with DOS 8.3 name mangling in mind (and oversight, and something I've been meaning to talk to the XFree86 project about). You can either do this, or tar up the entire dist onto your DOS partition and then copy it back and unpack it under FreeBSD. Just so it doesn't get squeezed through the DOS namespace! > 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. No, you didn't. It's entirely up to you where you put your users. Nothing magic about /home. > - Is it true that install will say it's giving "/bin/sh" but actually gives > "/bin/ksh"? Well, no. > - Are csh and sh the only shells available? By default, yes. Look in the packages directory though. > - 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? None of it. sh is just a cheap shell we got for free! :-) > - 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 I'm afraid that this is kind of advanced and I don't have time to go into it now, due to the fact that I'm sitting on an X terminal in the USENIX terminal room at the moment. For now, I would simply forget about mounting your extended partition. I wouldn't even know how to give instructions to someone who wasn't already well familiar with this stuff. It really needs to be automated. > 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 Everybody has their own standards - don't sweat it. > 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"? Well, you could argue with the boot manager author about this.. :-) See the sysinstall source code for the reference - I don't have his address handy at the moment. > 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. It makes no sense to install a boot manager on the second disk. PCs only boot off the first disk. > - 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? It's on the first boot floppy! You'll see a (T)utorial command at the fdisk and disklabel screens. Jordan
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