Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 02:05:35 -0500 From: "barry (b.l.) friedman" <friedman@bnr.ca> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: New Install / Observations & Gripes Message-ID: <9601080706.AA00136@nmerh209>
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Got my Walnut Creek Cd-Rom this week and although the sailing was not exactly smooth I'm pleased to say that after about 10 hours of work it's up and running and networked with my sun w/s. This is pretty amazing for free S/W. Here are the rough spots I encountered. First of all my cdrom is on a soundblaster which had it's port address set to 0x340 which defaulted to mcd1 instead of mcd0. So my first reaction to the install procedure which was "WOW - this is a SYSTEM!" (After struggling with the InfoMagic linux maze) was quickly nipped when the install informed me that I didn't have a CD-ROM on my system. The next problem was that I wanted to install on a second hard-drive without messing up a running dos/win3.1 system already installed on the first drive. After sorting the cdrom port address out and going through the first install I chose not to install a boot manager and assumed that the boot track would not be disturbed. I received a rude shock when my machine would no longer boot anything -- in fact it displayed a frightening message in double height letters to the effect that my CMOS was destroyed or something. I had to re-install dos to fix this (I didn't know about the fdisk /mbr undocumented boot track restorer at this point) but assumed I had done something wrong in the install. Once this was fixed I was hit with the dreaded 1024>1023 message since my default dos partition took up the whole first 512megs. O.K. I re-allocated the disk and tried again, this time going through the Novice installation and selecting minimal packages, blissfully believing that I would be able to run /stand/sysinstall and pick up anything I needed later. Well - It trashed my MBR again and again I re-installed DOS. O.K., I thought, so far so good now let's try the /stand/sysinstall - guess what - It would not recognize the cdrom at all (why?). "mount /cdrom" didn't help. I figured that maybe I could go back to the boot floppy and complete the installation from that -- but no dice -- it informed me that there was no room on some filesystem -- I guess it doesn't like to be run on top of an already built filesystem. So after picking out the packages I needed manually I tried reading the html docs. Surprise there too. It seems that the docs are under construction. So I'm left with the following headscratchers: 1) What the heck is the second cd-rom (live filesystem) supposed to be used for. (Couldn't find anything on that at all, neither in the little guide or in the docs.) 2) How do I mount a DOS disk if this is possible? The mount_msdos man page informs that it doesn't work with post dos 3.3 filesystems and in any case it didn't like any of the /dev files I tried. The FAQ only refers to DOS extended partitions, what about a DOS-only disk. 3) How can I get the boot floppy to automatically boot my wd1(1,a)/kernel without having to type it in every time? (I'm still not brave enough, nor do I see how to install the boot manager without re-doing the entire install.) 4) I hesitate to mention this but I haven't had any luck getting X11 running yet. I have an ATI SVGAWONDER-XL card and a mumble bus mouse which doesn't get recognized although the probe finds it even though it appears at a non standard place. Worse luck is that I don't have any docs on the SAMTRON monitor I've got and not a clue to the vert refresh rates -- Oh, well. X comes up in B/W with the pointer frozen in the lower right of the the screen. Maybe a pointer to the XF86 docs would be in order? ================================= As a footnote to the above, I must add that I am really quite pleased with the flexibility of the boot disk device re-assignment capabilities since the reason I gave up on linux in the first place was that it would not recognize my ethernet card (NE2000) by autoprobing and I was told that I would have to re-build the kernel and hard code the card address to get it to work. Regards, Barry -- Barry Friedman friedman@bnr.ca E-mail gratefully accepted. Thanks.
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