Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 00:04:43 -0600 From: Nate Williams <nate@trout.sri.MT.net> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Early feedback on the release (not sysinstall) Message-ID: <199505310604.AAA10045@trout.sri.MT.net>
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I borrowed a laptop from work to check out the new install stuff, but knowing that it's a brand-new release I was looking for new instructions on what is required aside from the 'all you need is boot.flp'. Since that box doesn't have an ethernet controller right now, and it will never have a CD-ROM drive I'm not sure what files I need, and I couldn't find any pointers anywhere on the ftp site to let me know. The instructions on what to do with the file 'boot.flp' got lost. Basically, we need a pointer somewhere on what the particular files are, and how they are supposed to be used. Since I done dozens of FreeBSD installs I assume that boot.flp is probably a disk image, but given the weird sizes (as Warner already pointed out) it's no altogether obvious what root.flp is. The two taken together w/out any docs add some doubt as to how to even start the installation process. I'm in the process of downloading both floppy images, and I will attempt to install FreeBSD after dd'ing 'boot.flp' onto a freshly formatted floppy. After that I'm at a loss. First of all, our BIOS boot loader doesn't work on an IBM-Thinkpad 750C, so I had to apply some hacks to the bootblocks which were posted to the NetBSD mailing list to overcome the problems with the 2.88MB floppy in order to even boot the floppy. Once that was done, the kernel loaded and uncompressed itself and proceeded to tell me all about the machine and what I didn't have installed. :-) However, it didn't get past the point where it said: 'rootfs is 1075 Kbyte compiled in MFS'. It's possible that installing on a 4MB machine is not possible, but since it's the only machine I have to test the installation stuff on I'm kinda stuck at this point. After further hassle, it turns out that I'm going to need to do more hacking than I have already. The keyboard scan codes are completely weirded out as I can't even get my keystrokes to be registered correctly. In any case, it would be nice to have the scroll-back buffers documented in the release notes so folks can go look at the scrolled-off information from the boot process. Even trying to find that information in the documentation is difficult. I resorted to the looking at the source code. More in the days to come as I am able to get further along in the install. Nate
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