Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 10:13:52 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: hosokawa@jp.FreeBSD.org Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Well, I finally bought a test laptop and decided to jump in... Message-ID: <13127.869764432@time.cdrom.com>
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Nothing special, just a little "Compaq Armada" which was on sale for $1100, but I also got a small selection of PCCARD periphs for it and intend to use it for testing and debugging the pccard support. Some initial impressions: When I first got it, I did what everybody else probably does and grabbed the 2.2.2 PAO floppy for installation (this laptop deliberately does not have a CDROM, so I need to do installs the hard way :-). It dutifully found my LINKSYS ethernet device and before long I was doing an NFS install from my mounted 2.2.2 CD. So far, so good. Now I'm up with 2.2.2 and the pccard support has, of course, disappeared so I'm patching in the PAO-970616 stuff and I'm noticing that some of the "patch it and make it work" Makefile stuff is a bit out of date (e.g. for a different version of the PAO stuff), but things are still reasonably straight-forward and I soon have a pccard enabled kernel of my own. Then comes the hassling with the contents of /etc/*pccard* and getting them updated, but after a few false starts and the insertion of a 10 second sleep into the file which starts pccardd so that it can have my ethernet device configured _before_ the other ifconfig stuff is run, it's working. Yay. Conclusions: This is harder than it needs to be and it really should be better integrated with the system - I understand that some of this stuff is "experimental", but where better to test and develop it than in FreeBSD's CVS repository? The same also goes for the PAO floppy installation hacks - it would be nice to bring this back into the mainstream install so that a boot-pao.flp image could be built automatically along with the 3.0 SNAPs which are currently rolling out of current.freebsd.org on those days when -current is buildable. ;-). I'm not sure if one generic boot.flp can be built with a "are you on a laptop?" question at the very beginning, but we should at least be able to build the floppy as an extra image. To all these ends, I'm willing to help test, integrate and import this stuff into -current but I need to know if the 2.2.2 stuff is a good starting place. Some things appear to no longer be quite in sync there, such as the shutdown mods which don't appear to use the fancier callout list that was introduced in 3.0, and I'm also fairly sure that a little editing will have to take place with the /etc files to bring them up to date. I'm also not sure about the current state of integration with the APM code - the patches there would not apply at all, leading me to believe that the APM bits in the 2.2.2 PAO kit are already in -current. Shall we get this stuff into 3.0? It's light-years better than what we have now, and had it not been for the PAO kit I would not have had an easy time of installing this machine at all. By not integrating the PAO stuff in all this time, we've denied laptop users the ability to install the 3.0 SNAPs and that's an unfortunate situation which should be fixed. Comments? Jordan
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