Date: Sat, 4 Sep 1999 23:07:41 -0400 (EDT) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: markh@lon.imag.net (Mark Hendriks) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Install Question: Make my own install CD? Message-ID: <199909050307.XAA13150@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <199909050131.SAA25304@superman.imag.net> from Mark Hendriks at "Sep 4, 1999 06:31:49 pm"
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Mark Hendriks wrote, > I will soon be acquiring a new computer, which will allow me to upgrade to a > real operating system. I'm definitely interested in FreeBSD, but I don't have > a credit card to order the CD from Walnut Creek, and FTP over 56k modem doesn't > sound like a whole lot of fun. Just to be curious, if I go with the base > system, X Windows, KDE, and client-side Internet apps, any rough guess on how > long such an FTP would take? Hours. > A friend of mine has a cable modem, (which isn't as much faster than phone modem > as the cable companies say, but definitely still faster, especially if you pick > the right time of day,) What phone companies would claim that? Coax cable can be roughly 20x faster. > and a CD burner. The plan I'm hoping to talk my friend > into is to FTP from her computer, and copy onto CD. > > Three questions: > 1) For those who have cable modem, and have a good feel for the actual speed > of a cable modem, if I go with what I stated in the first paragraph, any ideas > on how long this would take with cable modem? A camble modem will have no problem moving along a Mb/s. Bottle necks in the d/l could very well be someplace else on the 'Net. Given the distribution is a few 100 MB, we are talking a couple of minutes... Wait, just for you, I'll suck down today's 3.2 snapshot over my coax modem: % ftp ftp://current.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i386/3.2-19990903-STABLE.tar Connected to usw2.freebsd.org. 220 usw2.freebsd.org FTP server (Version wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-18-VR13](1) Tue Mar 16 13:04:12 CST 1999) ready. 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. 200 Type set to I. 250 CWD command successful. 250 CWD command successful. local: 3.2-19990903-STABLE.tar remote: 3.2-19990903-STABLE.tar 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for /usr/bin/tar. 226 Transfer complete. 121210880 bytes received in 757.80 seconds (156.20 KB/s) 221-You have transferred 121210880 bytes in 1 files. 221-Total traffic for this session was 121211672 bytes in 1 transfers. 221-Thank you for using the FTP service on usw2.freebsd.org. 221 Goodbye. OK, 156.20 KB/s, that's only 1.25 Mb/s. Not too fast today. It took about 12 minutes. Note that that did not include X. It would be a few more MBs. > 2) Regarding the actual installation, should I create a DOS partition on my own > machine, and copy the CD to there, or should I be able to install straight from > the CD I created? Go straight from the CD. The only thing that might stop you here is if the CD is some unusual type or in some weird configuration. Any "normal" IDE or SCSI CDROM should do fine. > 3) If I can go straight from CD, do I still follow the instructions for > installing from a DOS partition? If you boot into DOS, I guess... But I've never done that. If you boot from the CD, it will go straight into the install menu (after a screen to give the kernel some guesses about your hardware). > Two more pieces of information: > 1) M$ Windows will definitely not find its way on to my new machine, so > creating a DOS partition only to reformat it after the installation is > complete is just extra steps it would be nice to not have to bother with. I do not know why you would need to then. > 2) My friend with the cable modem only has Win95 on her computer. Hmmm... You'll want to burn a RockRidge CD with "El Torrito" booting. Dunno what tools are out there to do that. > Since I've never actually installed any flavour of Unix before, I'm kinda > reluctant to install FreeBSD without the "official" CD. Unless I'm fairly > confident in the above plan, I may go with Linux. I know a store where I can > get the CDs (and I'd even have a choice, but from what I've heard, I'd probably > go with Debian.) You can get FreeBSD CDs at a store too. Look for "The Complete FreeBSD" in a book store. It's a nice FreeBSD reference plus the full four CD distribution. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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