Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:45:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> To: Ian Howson <ianh@geocities.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A bunch of questions on FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970814233855.15845B-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <199708140703.AAA24388@geocities.com>
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On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Ian Howson wrote: > I am currently working on getting FreeBSD installed and would appreciate it > very much if you could answer some of my questions. > > 1. In the FAQs somewhere it mentions that FreeBSD will work with the OnTrack > disk manager. Since I am a user of that I assumed it would be OK for me to > just choose the BootEasy option when installing a boot manager. I did and it > ended up erasing my driver software, making it impossible for me to access > my D: drive (2GB) which contained everything but Windows 95. Why is it that > FreeBSD stuffed up my driver software despite it saying it was OK in the > FAQ? (BTW I got all my data back) FreeBSD will work fine with OnTrack, but booteasy won't since OnTrack is installed in the system's boot sector, which is where booteasy installs itself too. You'll have to find a different boot selector that doesn't install anything into the boot sector. The OS/2 / PartitionMagic selector might not do this, but you have to have 2mb of unallocated space to install it. > 2. Later I went back and tried to install again. This time I chose 'None' > for the boot manager option. I restarted my computer and was again slightly > alarmed when I got the FreeBSD boot menu instead of 'Starting Windows '95'. > I went into FDisk and reset the active partition to what it was before. Is > there any better way of doing this (since I can't use BootEasy) Can I boot > from a disk and have it automatically go into FreeBSD? I think you can, but it requires lots of pain. > 3. In both of the attempts before, it stopped installing when it got to > 'Chunk 29 of 74' (about 40%) I thought I hadn't allocated enough to the / > directory (I'd only given it 20M since I was running low on space) so I went > and changed it to 50M. Same problem. Is there a problem with the BIN file > and if so, is there an easy way to check if they downloaded OK? The CHECKSUM.MD5 file has checksums for all of the files, and there is a DOS util to calculate them on the ftpsite/CDROM. > 4. What's the deal with this 2*MEM size for the swap file system? The way I > interpret that it means you need a swapfile double the size of how much > physical RAM you have. Shouldn't it be that the more RAM you have (I have > 16M) the less swap space you need? Please explain. To a point. When you get into sizes >128mb, you can relax that some, but it depends on what you're doing. I have 40mb in my current box and running X Windows, and I rarely swap, but do have 100mb of swap just in case I start firing off lots of big programs (like the mbone tools). > 5. The distribution options (like User, X-User, Developer, etc) are REALLY > confusing! Can I simply assume all options are covered in the 70 BIN files > you download, or do I need to get more files to use things like the ports > collection? The bin distribution covers the basic system binaries and config files and the GENERIC kernel. It is required. You can install more or less as you desire. > 6. How do I resize my primary partition on a disk? I did it once but it's > too big and I can't figure out how to do it again. You can use the 'FIPS' program on the CD or ftp site or buy Partition Magic. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major
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