Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 00:30:43 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: "House of Debuggin'" <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Boot disks insane? Message-ID: <199505310630.AAA00237@rover.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 31 May 1995 00:45:15 EDT
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: They say this Warner Losh person was kidding when he wrote: Yes. He was, but how did you know :-) : Uhm... either this is a fiendishly clever troll, or somebody up there : has it in for Jordan. No. It was an HONEST mistake. I misread the README.FIRST and thought all I needed was *r*oot.flp. So I go off and get it and discover that I was wrong.... : Didn't you notice that boot.flp is 1228800 bytes in size, which is : exactly big enough to fit onto a 5.25" high density diskette? Yes. But in the past there have been two disks, one much larger than the other.... and usually you booted the smaller one (gzipped) and the larger one had all the useful files you needed. : The funny thing is that I remember seeing the commit message where : Jordan renamed cpio.flp to root.flp, and in the log entry he said he : did it to reduce confusion. I guess you showed him. :) :-(. I'll never get a FreeBSD 2.0.5 CD at this rate :-) Anyway, I encountered a large number of problems with installing this release. I tried to do the FTP release thing (from a local host) and found that I got an unspecified error -1 no matter what host I pointed it at. Maybe I did something wrong, but it sure was frustrating to discover this. I don't think that ncftp is on boot.flp. I couldn't find it when I used that useful shell on the forth screen. Also, there should be some way to mount old file systems so that you can just ftp the files from ftp.freebsd.org to your local hard disk (say overnight when you know the load is low) and thenn do the install. As it was, I had to unpack them by hand to get a somewhat bootable system. Then I tried to continue with things like configure and the like, but they didn't have any effect, so I've been cranking things by hand. All this to find out if I can use the ijppp to test against a ppp product that I'm working on (the one on 2.0R seems useless :-(. It would be nice if there was some way to say "There's my 2.0R disks, figure out all these silly questions from that system, do the right thing with the new system, and be about your business," but I understand that is a 2.1R project. The new install is cool and fairly nice, but the disk disk partition and disk label tools need some feedback as to what happens when you hit <ESC>. It would be nice if it remembered mount points accross reboots, but that is minor... Oh, is it "safe" to use old, unconverted file systems with the 2.0.5-ALPHA *AND* the 2.0R kernel at the same time (meaning that sometimes the 2.0R kernel is reading/writing them, and at other times the 2.0.5-ALPHA kernel is reading/writing them). I got lots of warnings when I booted saying that the label was hosed on my old disks, since parts of it weren't completely within the bounds of the disk. All in all, this is a much improved install system, despite my complaints about it. It will likely need some polish around the edges before it is ready for 2.0.5R (Sorry Jordan). Warner
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