Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 15:46:41 -0400 (EDT) From: Jeff Aitken <jaitken@cslab.vt.edu> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: H. Jared Agnew Message-ID: <199509071946.PAA11164@husky.cslab.vt.edu>
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Dear -hackers, I'd like to apologize to those of you who keep receiving email from poor clueless Va. Tech freshmen concerning FreeBSD. I'd like to take this time to clarify things, and hopefully avoid any further confusion. Last school year, we made the decision to change the required / recommended student platform to an x86 based machine running FreeBSD. In the past the department has required some sort of Unix workstation. Information concerning the recommended platform was sent to all prospective incoming CS students, explaining quite clearly that if they purchased some other brand of computer, they were completely on their own as far as technical support goes. Over the summer, one of the department's systems engineers built a custom CD-ROM containing, among other things that CS students need, a release of FreeBSD-2.0.5. Because of a small oversight on his part, the install doesn't work out of the box (we have to distribute a new boot floppy image for people to use). However, we talked with the professor who is teaching the "introductory" class, part of which will cover the installation and general use of FreeBSD, and he was quite willing to put off anything that required Unix until mid-October. He made an announcement in class that students should *not* try to install FreeBSD on their machines until such time as he had covered it in class. He also explained to his students exactly what they are to do if and when they encounter problems. Students were also reminded what *not* to do if they ran into trouble with their machines, including contacting Walnut Creek CD-ROM, or pestering the FreeBSD developers (e.g., by sending annoying email messages to a dozen of them :). Please disregard such questions in the future; if students cannot bother to go to class, or read local newsgroups (which they are given access to from the day they arrive here), then they are out of luck. Anyway, I wanted to apologize to those of you who are running in circles trying to figure out what in the hell some of these kids are babbling about (Jordan especially), when they were told not to bother you in the first place. And to clear up at least two other misconceptions: we have no deal with IBM whereby IBM "makes whatever software we have work". IBM would almost certainly never agree to such a deal, especially if we told them we wanted them to make a piece of "freeware" work on their hardware. Second, we are NOT using IDE CD-ROM drives. We're using some generic sound card/CD-ROM combo that works with the matcd driver (after a little hacking of the driver). I don't know where Mr. Agnew got these ideas, but neither one of them is true. -- Jeff Aitken jaitken@vt.edu
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