Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 23:24:51 -0700 From: xavian anderson macpherson <professional3d@home.com> To: Bob Martin <bob@buckhorn.net>, darkinmage@bigfoot.com, tagdot57@aol.com, "Person, Roderick" <personrp@ccbh.com>, mongor@mail.FreeBSD.ORG, com@home.com, "fatboy@linuxbr.com.br" <fatboy@linuxbr.com.br>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: installing freebsd in an existing linux environment Message-ID: <39D6D8B3.8DAA4C0D@home.com> References: <39D571DA.FCCDD909@home.com> <39D5D2F8.BFB645E6@buckhorn.net>
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------6D141DEFA7D62D6ED044ACEC Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------2F286BD1E68E7042D414AD0F" --------------2F286BD1E68E7042D414AD0F Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit THIS WAS ADDRESSED TO BOB. BUT I AM ACTULLY WRITING MANY OF YOU AT ONCE. LAST NIGHT I STARTED WHAT WAS MEANT TO BE THE FIRST OF A CONTINUING NEWSLETTER, DOCUMENTING THE PROCESS OF MY TRANSITION TO AND INSTALLATION OF FREEBSD. SOME OF YOU I HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME, SOME OF YOU I HAVE BEEN ONLY RECENTLY CONTACTED THROUGH THE WEB. I HOPE THIS IS AN INTERESTING BUT NOT DAMNING EXPERIENCE! hi bob, thanks for your response last night. i got my freebsd today by fedex. i am in the process of going through the manual. i am trying to determine the best way to configure my system. i have attached a copy of my SuSE-YaST generated /etc/fstab file. what i am trying to figure out is, does freebsd use a boot partition; or more accurately, is there a separate directory called /boot for freebsd? is the bootstrap a directory, or is it just a file? the reason why i bring this up, is that my `/' partition is not the first in my line of 4 disks. in fact it is the third, at /dev/hdc1. now granted i will change some of slice dimensions, as i was led to believe that my current root is too large (at 1.2 GB's). in df-dimensions, you will find the print-out of the current dimensions of my system as revealed by the `df' command. disk free for those in this list who are not unix savvy. based on what i've been reading, i'll certainly mount /tmp in mfs (the virtual memory file system) on my swap drive. i use all of my scsi disk for my swap buffer, 528MB's. and so far, it is hardly ever used. but then again i have 256MB's of ram. what i need to know is, does the data in /tmp when mounted on mfs get flushed back to (the ide) disk, or is it simply lost? i geuss it doesn't matter since it is only tempory anyway. i have the rest of my system spread out over 4 ide drives, as you will see by using jed or someother editor to view the /etc/fstab file. what i want to know is, can i simply keep my old partition specifications but reformatting them to ufs? what does freebsd offer as an equivalent to LVM (the logical volume manager) used by linux. i will most likely change the current directory /pub to /usr/ports. /pub is where i keep all of my rpms. but i will do that after i have moved all of my data from the other partitions to new locations. something that i need to know is, can i get access to my partitions during the installation process. what i've done with linux is, open one of the tty's to mount `/' on /mnt so that i could have access to the programs (specifically, the rpm manager itself) during the installation. i don't really need to do that here, but i do need to juggle the data on my drives from one `slice' to another, while i am reformatting; because i don't have a single `slice' that is large enough to hold all of them in one location. actually i have two `/' filesystems on my computer. one is the linux-mandrake system which is not functional, the other is the suse distribution which i reinstalled because of mandrake's failure to perform. everytime i try to boot i keep getting errors. although it has gotten better. right now there is a problem with SysVinit not being able to read libc.so.6. it doesn't make any sense to me because it is there. i checked with `ls' (list). the only thing is that it is a symbolic link to another file. i think it is libc++-2.1.3, or something like that. i was trying to compile the mandrake hackkernel-2.4.0-0.24mdk. the compilation went just fine. but for a longtime, i couldn't get the modules to load properly. finally i have gotten it to make module_install. but there is one of my files missing that controls the system updatedb command. what's happening is that i load packages, but then the system doesn't know about it; and i have not figured out which package i have to reload to get it to work. frankly, i'm just tired of the incompatabilities between the linux distributions; as it was that that cause this problem in the first place. but then linux is still so much of a beta system, that i don't trust it anymore to devote anymore of my time to it. i mean i had the good fortune of talking to one of the packagers for mandrake who openly admitted that the linux set i purchased (mandrake 7.0) had only been beta tested for two weeks before it was released. that's a bunch of crap! i'm not about to subject myself to that kind of treatment again. when i buy a system (or anything else for that matters) i want to know that it will work properly out of the box, and not be something of a work in progress. that's kind of like going to a bakery to buy a cake that's not fully baked! and you know what happened to Marie Antoinette who had the audacity to tell her subjects to eat cake. well so much for history! ; ) and they said the future was looking brighter? well i hope so with freebsd. i was prepared to stop. but realized that i haven't gotten the one answer which is most critical. how does freebsd deal with file conflicts? with linux, using the rpm system, you get notices of file conflicts even before you actually install any packages. i don't see where any such mechanism is available for that purpose in freebsd. if there really is none, then i want to know is how do i compile the source binaries for rpm so that i can use it under freebsd? because my main desire is for the bsd kernel. i want the stability and security of the bsd kernel, matched with the wide data base of linux packages, or as freebsd would refer to them, ports. it seems that freebsd would simply overwrite existing files with new ones is the old one has the same name. maybe the best that i could hope for is that the old would have it's name changed or altered to something like *.orig, *.old, etc. but then this may not be a problem at all. i just want to know before i embark on this journey into madness. so, he who has an answer, let him speak! --------------2F286BD1E68E7042D414AD0F Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <b><font size=+1>THIS WAS ADDRESSED TO BOB. BUT I AM ACTULLY WRITING MANY OF YOU AT ONCE. LAST NIGHT I STARTED WHAT WAS MEANT TO BE THE FIRST OF A CONTINUING NEWSLETTER, DOCUMENTING THE PROCESS OF MY TRANSITION TO AND INSTALLATION OF FREEBSD. SOME OF YOU I HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME, SOME OF YOU I HAVE BEEN ONLY RECENTLY CONTACTED THROUGH THE WEB. I HOPE THIS IS AN INTERESTING BUT NOT DAMNING EXPERIENCE!</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>hi bob, thanks for your response last night. i got my freebsd today by fedex. i am in the process of going through the manual. i am trying to determine the best way to configure my system. i have attached a copy of my SuSE-YaST generated /etc/fstab file. what i am trying to figure out is, does freebsd use a boot partition; or more accurately, is there a separate directory called /boot for freebsd? is the bootstrap a directory, or is it just a file? the reason why i bring this up, is that my `/' partition is not the first in my line of 4 disks. in fact it is the third, at /dev/hdc1. now granted i will change some of slice dimensions, as i was led to believe that my current root is too large (at 1.2 GB's). in df-dimensions, you will find the print-out of the current dimensions of my system as revealed by the `df' command. disk free for those in this list who are not unix savvy.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>based on what i've been reading, i'll certainly mount /tmp in mfs (the virtual memory file system) on my swap drive. i use all of my scsi disk for my swap buffer, 528MB's. and so far, it is hardly ever used. but then again i have 256MB's of ram. what i need to know is, does the data in /tmp when mounted on mfs get flushed back to (the ide) disk, or is it simply lost? i geuss it doesn't matter since it is only tempory anyway.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1> i have the rest of my system spread out over 4 ide drives, as you will see by using jed or someother editor to view the /etc/fstab file. what i want to know is, can i simply keep my old partition specifications but reformatting them to ufs? what does freebsd offer as an equivalent to LVM (the logical volume manager) used by linux.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>i will most likely change the current directory /pub to /usr/ports. /pub is where i keep all of my rpms. but i will do that after i have moved all of my data from the other partitions to new locations. something that i need to know is, can i get access to my partitions during the installation process. what i've done with linux is, open one of the tty's to mount `/' on /mnt so that i could have access to the programs (specifically, the rpm manager itself) during the installation. i don't really need to do that here, but i do need to juggle the data on my drives from one `slice' to another, while i am reformatting; because i don't have a single `slice' that is large enough to hold all of them in one location.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>actually i have two `/' filesystems on my computer. one is the linux-mandrake system which is not functional, the other is the suse distribution which i reinstalled because of mandrake's failure to perform. everytime i try to boot i keep getting errors. although it has gotten better. right now there is a problem with SysVinit not being able to read libc.so.6. it doesn't make any sense to me because it is there. i checked with `ls' (list). the only thing is that it is a symbolic link to another file. i think it is libc++-2.1.3, or something like that. i was trying to compile the mandrake hackkernel-2.4.0-0.24mdk. the compilation went just fine. but for a longtime, i couldn't get the modules to load properly. finally i have gotten it to make module_install. but there is one of my files missing that controls the system updatedb command. what's happening is that i load packages, but then the system doesn't know about it; and i have not figured out which package i have to reload to get it to work.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>frankly, i'm just tired of the incompatabilities between the linux distributions; as it was that that cause this problem in the first place. but then linux is still so much of a beta system, that i don't trust it anymore to devote anymore of my time to it. i mean i had the good fortune of talking to one of the packagers for mandrake who openly admitted that the linux set i purchased (mandrake 7.0) had only been beta tested for two weeks before it was released. that's a bunch of crap! i'm not about to subject myself to that kind of treatment again. when i buy a system (or anything else for that matters) i want to know that it will work properly out of the box, and not be something of a work in progress. that's kind of like going to a bakery to buy a cake that's not fully baked! and you know what happened to Marie Antoinette who had the audacity to tell her subjects to eat cake. well so much for history! ; ) and they said the future was looking brighter? well i hope so with freebsd.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>i was prepared to stop. but realized that i haven't gotten the one answer which is most critical. how does freebsd deal with file conflicts? with linux, using the rpm system, you get notices of file conflicts even before you actually install any packages. i don't see where any such mechanism is available for that purpose in freebsd. if there really is none, then i want to know is how do i compile the source binaries for rpm so that i can use it under freebsd? because my main desire is for the bsd kernel. i want the stability and security of the bsd kernel, matched with the wide data base of linux packages, or as freebsd would refer to them, ports. it seems that freebsd would simply overwrite existing files with new ones is the old one has the same name. maybe the best that i could hope for is that the old would have it's name changed or altered to something like *.orig, *.old, etc. but then this may not be a problem at all. i just want to know before i embark on this journey into madness.</font></b><b><font size=+1></font></b> <p><b><font size=+1>so, he who has an answer, let him speak!</font></b></html> --------------2F286BD1E68E7042D414AD0F-- --------------6D141DEFA7D62D6ED044ACEC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="fstab" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="fstab" # End of YaST-generated fstab lines /dev/hda1 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda2 /root ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda3 /var ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb1 /usr/src ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdc1 / ext2 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdd1 /pub ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdd2 /usr ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdd3 /usr/share ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdd4 /usr/X11R6 ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/sda1 swap_upgrade swap defaults 0 0 /mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount fs=vfat,dev=/dev/fd0 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom 0 0 --------------6D141DEFA7D62D6ED044ACEC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="df-dimensions" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="df-dimensions" Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hdd1 4507288 3311276 967048 77% / /dev/hda1 17534 8363 8266 50% /boot /dev/hdc1 1232176 665084 504500 57% /mnt /dev/hda3 575436 165968 380236 30% /mnt/var /dev/hdd2 4762412 2243352 2277140 50% /mnt/usr /dev/hda2 20777 1049 18620 5% /mnt/root /dev/hdb1 817480 209664 566288 27% /mnt/usr/src /dev/hdd3 2025968 1075108 847944 56% /mnt/usr/share /dev/hdd4 1777952 561040 1126596 33% /mnt/usr/X11R6 --------------6D141DEFA7D62D6ED044ACEC-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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