From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 23 13:20:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from peloton.physics.montana.edu (peloton.physics.montana.edu [153.90.192.177]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1ED1014C1B for ; Wed, 23 Jun 1999 13:20:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brett@peloton.physics.montana.edu) Received: from localhost (brett@localhost) by peloton.physics.montana.edu (8.8.8/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA05492; Wed, 23 Jun 1999 14:19:44 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from brett@peloton.physics.montana.edu) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 14:19:44 -0600 (MDT) From: Brett Taylor To: Marty C Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Many stupid Questions about UNIX and FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <3770D143.41C67EA6@globalserve.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-ID: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, Marty C wrote: > If any of these questions are stupid or redundant, please ignore them > and accept my apologies; After using FreeBSD for just under a week, I > have the following questions: > > 1) Who uses FreeBSD? Students, proffessionals, etc? All of those and more. Primarily FreeBSD has been marketed at servers, but it makes an excellent workstation and a great scientific desktop. > (I really like FreeBSD and I'm not trying to dis' it, but I don't see > my mom configuring her own kernel)? Can your mom add a printer to Windows? I can't, but I can configure my kernel (well, I know how to add the printer in Windows, but the process itself failed and I finally gave up since it wasn't my machine). > 2) When I install and try to run the Netscape 4.51 on my CD's > (FreeBSD3.2) I get an error about "ld.so"... Is this because We need more than this - chances are (guessing here) is that you didn't install the compat-2.2 package on installation. Netscape is an a.out executable and FreeBSD 3.2 is ELF - to run Netscape you'll need the compat-2.2 libs to run the a.out version. Option 2 is to use the Linux Netscape port (if you have the Linux compatibility stuff installed). > 3)NetScape 3.04 doesn't seem to run java applets, though it > seems to try... This I don't know about. > 4)word perfect and klyx (the BSD ports from freebsd.org) have > fuzzy buttons that I believe stem from their not being able to find > their own graphics... Is this a common error everyone knows how to > fix, or is something messed on my system or what? These should just work - I've installed Word Perfect on one of my machines and it worked fine - can you give us more description of what "fuzzy" buttons mean? Are the images not there or are they fuzzy? > 5)When configuring one's KERNEL file, is the GENERIC file the > one that is used to build the start kernel I am booting with now > (having not yet found the courage to try and compile my own)? (as in > if I do nothing but add the "sb" driver line, will I have exactly the > same kernel but with sound?) Yep. I believe that GENERIC comes w/ sound support though. It may not be finding it though. > can I assume the irq values are good? failing that, are the ones > spewed out by the booting process necessarily right/complete? > shift+PgUP in a console doesn't seem to work from outside X... Anyone > know how to get to the messages that have already scrolled by? You can usually assume they are good - check though w/ dmesg (just type 'dmesg | more' or 'more /var/run/dmesg.boot'). > -- if, while I am looking inside of KERNEL (the kernel compilation > directives file), I don't know what something is, don't think I have it > and certainly have never actually used it, but have NO clue what it is, > is it better to leave it or remove it? It's better to read LINT and consult your dmesg - did GENERIC detect it? If so leave it in (assuming it's something you want...). > -- assuming I go as far as "make" but not "make install", can > compiling a new kernel mangle mr. computer? If it compiles OK, is that > good proof that will boot OK? Nope. Make all you want. Even installing won't be bad - you can always boot kernel.old or kernel.generic (you should see if these exist in / though before). Make install moves the current kernel to kernel.old so that won't be a problem. [kernel config deleted - sorry I don't have time to look at that right now but let me know if you have problems] > 6) At seemingly random moments I get a message (similar to) > "/kernel: acd1 read_toc failure"; should I be worried? It means that your Atapi CD-ROM is having a read failure. Whether it's bad or not depends on what you're doing. :-) Brett *********************************************************** Brett Taylor brett@peloton.physics.montana.edu * brett@daemonnews.org * * http://www.daemonnews.org/ * *********************************************************** To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message