Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 02:15:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek <hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca> To: DuckHunter <smpc@aloha.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD, Unix, and other questions Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960728015601.21217A-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> In-Reply-To: <31FAF7DD.4E41@aloha.net>
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On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, DuckHunter wrote: > Hi. I'm a fairly experienced Dos & Windows user with enough knowledge of > Unix to perform basic file management and use networking utilities. Ive > read the docs online. How hard is it to install FreeBsd on a system that > also runs Win95 (I need it for my GUI loving parents) *really*? Also, Well, I have both Win95 and FreeBSD on my machine here. I use FBSDBOOT.EXE to boot FreeBSD instead of using FreeBSD's boot-selector, booteasy (for political reasons). FBSDBOOT runs finely from Win95 (better from Win95 than from Dos 6). Win95 will prompt you for the special way to run FBSDBOOT (DOS mode, etc). I have a special user in Win95, `fbsd', which has FBSDBOOT.EXE in it's startup folder. I used Fips to split my Win95 partition. FreeBSD's dosfs code can't read the Win95 partition without destroying the FreeBSD partition, but Win95 is able to read the Win95 partition perfectly. With the eventual realease of vfatfs, FreeBSD should be able to read the Win95 partition properly. If you have a CD-ROM as Drive D, you'll find that it gets shoved to Drive E. Win95 itself should adapt to this, but you'll find that almost everything else (including some Win95 applets) might not. You'll probably need to do some reconfiguring, including editing the various startup files such as \autoexec.* and \config.* (Note, that means stuff like autoexec.dos, autoexec.bat, etc). When you use rawrite to copy boot.flp onto a floppy, make sure you shutdown Win95 to DOS mode. Do the same when you use Fips. This is VERY IMPORTANT. I find that FreeBSD often doesn't recognize my parallel port. It will usually recognize it if I boot straight to FreeBSD without getting to the Win95 login prompt. This, of course, means power-cycling to boot FreeBSD twice (once after logging into Win95 as `fbsd', and then so that fbsdboot gets run before the Win95 login prompt). The other option is to go into my bios setup after Win95 reboots the computer (to run fbsdboot in DOS mode) and exit the bios setup (doing nothing) which also causes lpt0 to be properly recognized. I think the problem is (choose any two of the following three) hardware/Win95/FreeBSD. > how similar and how different is it from commercial BSDI UNIX? And will More similar than different. > it peform quickly (meaning no delays for text printing on screen) on a > P133 166Mb ram. I have had no troubles with Win95's or Dos's speed. I just cat'd /etc/termcap and it finished in about 1/4 of a second on my P100 w/ 16MB ram. /etc/termcap is a 3983 line file. This is, of course, probably the most meaningless indication of speed I've seen in a while. (whatch closely, and you'll see syscons cheets by updating the screen in bunches of lines instead of one line at a time). Anyways, I'm sure if you started enough copies of emacs (or whatever) at a time you'd manage to slow down screen scrolling to a crawl. OTOH, starting that many copies of emacs would probably crash some (nameless) operating systems... :) Seriously? You shouldn't have any troubles with speed. On the average, the multiple backgrounds I run in X usually take up about 10-15% CPU, and even with that drain the speed compares well. If I were to lose all that snazzy animation, I imagine it would do even better! :) I'd compare the amount of time taken to do a `make world' on FreeBSD to the amount of time taken to do a `make world' in Win95, but unfortunately, that's not possible... ;) -- Outnumbered? Maybe. Outspoken? Never! tIM...HOEk
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