Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 16:25:41 -0700 From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet@cs.ubc.ca> To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: comments on an attempted install Message-ID: <199504242325.QAA17567@grolsch.cs.ubc.ca>
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I just thought I'd share with you my experiences while trying to install FreeBSD. I'll try to keep it short. I'm quite familiar with installing operating systems, and with Unix admin. System config: (more info available on request) Intel 486DX/33, 16Mb RAM, AMI BIOS IDE drive 0: connor 116 Mb IDE drive 1: seagate 545 Mb (requiring MBR geometry remapping program) I was dismayed that it was not easier to pick and choose parts of the main distribution -- bindist is too huge. I was planning on installing over 14.4 (same way I installed Linux). After seeing what I'd have to download I decided to take my machine to school and plop it on the net. After some personal debate I decided to go with the 950411-SNAP. I built the boot and cpio floppies. At this point I ran into a huge snag that stumped me for a while. My machine wouldn't boot the boot floppy. It turns out that your boot floppy won't work with the MBR geometry remapping program that my 2nd 545Mb IDE drive "requires". I didn't have this problem with Linux, so it surprised me. "requires" is a strong word -- I don't intend to use that drive with anything other than FreeBSD/Linux. So I don't care if DOS can't touch it. This MBR program is one of those ones that requires you to hold down CTRL if you want to boot from floppy. If you want more information on it, contact me. I was happy to discover that FreeBSD didn't require the geometry remapper. (Well it gave me some error messages later which I just ignored... and it still seems to work.) (as an after thought: because FreeBSD doesn't work with it, and every other OS I've tried requires it (Linux, DOS, OS/2) I wouldn't be able to share my system with anything -- so this should probably be looked into -- once I get linux going again I can dump the MBR and send it to you if needed) I ran fdisk on drive 0 (I wanted 32Mb / and 32Mb swap remainder DOS). Fdisk should contain a list of the other partition types. Although I suppose you may have omitted them because of the boneheadedness of many other OSs that insist on their own fdisk being used to create partitions. Regardless, I couldn't set aside my DOS partition at the beginning of the disk. I was too lazy to bother booting DOS to try again. While running fdisk on drive 1 (the 545Mb drive with remapping) it complained about the geometry (32 heads is too many) but was able to figure out a geometry that it could live with. It is not obvious in disklabel that you have to Write your partitions before you can assign them. Neither is it obvious why this should be necessary. The docs briefly mention it. There was a random hanging problem if I tried to Assign before writing. Disklabel mistakenly had old partition information stuck in the tables. Partition information from before I ran fdisk on the disks. Confusing. I had to delete it before I could assign my partitions. (BTW, I wasn't concerned about keeping any old data on these disks.) Do disklabel and fdisk actually write anything to disk when you select Write? If not... then why does it require you to write? Otherwise, why is there a dialog after you select proceed that tells you you will wipe out your disks. If it has already written partition information you have already wiped out your disks. At the "Fdisk Disklabel Proceed" prompt I could never select proceed before doing a disklabel. Either there is a bug causing it to not read existing disklabels, or proceed should not be presented as an option. (I had to retry the boot disk from scratch several times due to problems with the net card.) The next problem I had was with the ed0 driver. I was planning on installing via ftp. My net card (WD8003E) worked fine under Linux, but I kept getting "ed0: device timeout" under FreeBSD. After hunting on the net via the freebsd homepage I was able to search the man pages and find docs on the ed0 errors. It was as I suspected -- the FreeBSD driver wasn't looking on the same IRQ as the Linux driver did. (I suspect the Linux driver hunts for the card on multiple IRQs, because I never had to specify where it was.) I don't have docs for the card, so I had to reboot several times while playing with the jumper. I didn't see documented anywhere where the driver expected the card to be -- it should be as part of the menu option when you're selecting it. The error messages for the various drivers should be a bit more accessible -- or maybe just stick the URL into the docs. If you are installing via the net, it prompts you for the FQDN and then it prompts you for the domain name. The domain name defaults to the same as the hostname. You should strip the first component. If installing via the net, and you run into problems, then you have to answer the net questions over and over again (should default to previous values). Since I was having problems with getting the net going, I wasn't selecting everything I wanted from the dist selection. I was only selecting bindist. Once I finally got it to work, I figured I could go back and run the install program again to install the other dists. But when I ran /stand/sysinstall it insisted that I disklabel again. (Which in and of itself seems silly -- it should at least read the existing disklabel.) It wasn't obvious to me how to ask it to install other dists. Maybe I missed something. Next I wanted to populate the system with popular utils. I tried to use the packages/ stuff from the ftp site, but it wouldn't run -- I figured there was some backwards incompatibility with the SNAP. So I tried to learn the ports system. The ports system is a GREAT idea. But, I couldn't figure out the "proper" way to populate /usr/ports. I tried just grabbing ports.tar.gz from one of the ftp sites, but (as you can guess) that tries to grab all of ports/distfiles! After about 30 minutes I wondered what could possibly be taking so long (the ports faq says there are only 10Mbish of ports files) so I did a zcat-tar on the file and noticed it was trying to grab the huge distfiles directory. Luckily for me it had already grabbed all the useful stuff. So I cancelled it and unpacked what I got, then cleaned out the distfiles directory. First package I tried to install was screen. Both ftp attempts failed to get the master source. I think perhaps there should be a single place where you can set a master list of ftp sites. Just trying freebsd.cdrom.com isn't enough -- since there are mirrors with all the distfiles. I eventually grabbed the source myself and stuck it in distfiles. Then screen built... but it doesn't work. It works fine if I run it under gdb however. What a bitch to debug ;) At this point it was 6am, and I figured my experience with FreeBSD was educational if anything :) I have reverted back to Linux for now. I hear you folks are planning 2.1 RSN, when it comes around I'll try this all again. [continued] So to install linux I ftp a bunch of crud to my machine running freebsd, I figure I'll copy it onto my dos partition. The machine doesn't have a dos partition yet, so I boot DOS and FDISK/FORMAT. Then I boot freebsd. Hmm, "man mount_msdos" directs me to "disklabel". But neither state that I absolutely cannot mount a partition which isn't mentioned in a disklabel. This seems like a really arbitrary restriction to me. Isn't /dev/wd0s2 the second slice on disk 0? That's where my dos partition is. But it didn't work. So I ran disklabel -e wd0 expecting to get that great graphical interface from the installation process. Boy was I wrong! Good thing I have half a brain, and good thing I had used up the rest of the disk for the dos partition. Otherwise I'm not sure how I would have calculated the shit "disklabel -e" wanted me to fill in. BTW, swapfiles (a la Linux) may not be the greatest w.r.t. performance, but on low diskspace machines they're a lifesaver. Besides, it seems like a waste of diskspace if you're sharing your machine between linux and freebsd to have to devote a partition to swapping in each OS. I'd rather stick a swapfile on a dos partition and share it between linux, os/2, and freebsd. (Too bad OS/2 is the only one that doesn't require some sort of special initialization for their swap files). Dean
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