Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 11:36:48 +0000 () From: Nik Clayton <nik@blueberry.co.uk> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: General comments on 2.1 install Message-ID: <199512181136.LAA00234@elbereth.blueberry.co.uk>
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How do,
I've just spent the weekend battling with the 2.1 install, and thought
I'd pass on a few random thoughts that occured to me as I was doing it.
o I like the new 'visual' kernel configuration. Very slick. However, I
didn't see any way of entering '-1' for some card defaults, which
normally means 'use whatever values the card knows about'.
With my (somewhat strange) 3c509 net card, I had to boot up with -c,
then do
port ep0 0x300
irq ep0 -1
visual
o It would be nice if values that are normally entered in hex prompted
a warning if they weren't preceeded with '0x'. A couple of times
fumble fingers would type 'port ep0 300', as opposed to '0x300'.
o I'd like to see the holographic shell appear somewhat earlier in the
installation. Ideally as soon as a working file system with utilities
is in place. This way I could go and manually FTP some of the
distributions into the right place by hand. The Passive FTP option
didn't work on some of the firewalled systems I tried this weekend,
and I had to force the shell to appear by selecting some other bogus
media.
o When installing a distribution, an 'estimated time to completion'
counter would be nice. The bar graph is nice, but when you're
installing bits over a 28.8 modem all the information you can get is
handy.
o My /etc/fstab file was written with the msdos filesystem as the first
entry. This is fine with MSDOSFS compiled into the kernel, but after
re-compiling a kernel with the MSDOSFS filesystem loaded on demand
(incidentally, what are the benefits of this, apart from a smaller
kernel image at boot time?) it would try to mount the MSDOS partition
before the LKM was in place. Shuffling the order of fstab fixes this.
o What's Apache doing in /etc/sysconfig? Don't things like that belong
rc.local? I realise that many people will be using FreeBSD as a Web
server, but couldn't this be better handled by the Apache port or
package, possibly as a post-install question to the user, something
like:
"Apache has been successfully installed. You will need to modify
your /etc/rc.local file to start Apache at boot time. Add these
lines to /etc/rc.local
if [ -x /usr/local/libexec/httpd ]; then
echo -n ' httpd (WWW)'
/usr/local/libexec/httpd -r /usr/local/www/config/httpd.conf
fi
I can add these lines for you. Would you like me to?"
Or similar? Incidentally, that line above runs my CERN server, but
you get the idea.
o I installed bits of the system down a SuperJANET link. Very fast,
~200K a second at some points. Trying to maximise this I thought I'd
do a "make fetch" for the ports I was interested, and then compile
them later in the day when I lost my net access. However, what this
didn't do was pull down any ports that the port depended on. I first
noticed this when "make fetch" for XV didn't get the JPEG and TIFF
libraries as well.
I went back and got them all by hand, but I thought that the ports
collection was designed to handle this sort of thing? Apologies if
it's not.
o I don't see any way of installing 2.1 from an existing 2.1 system.
It's not an issue for me right now, but if my current machine runs
2.1 successfully I'm planning on getting another one. It would be
nice if I could plug this new machine into the network, run some
server on the current 2.1 machine, point the new machine at it and
say "fetch".
I realise I could do this over FTP or NFS, but this would require the
existing 2.1 machine to have the 2.1 distribution tree on it, and I
don't really have the space at the moment to store a complete 2.1
system and a complete 2.1 distribution on this machine.
Um, there's probably more, but those are the ones I wrote down <grin>
Anyway, I'd just like to take this opportunity to say "Congratulations"
to everyone on the FreeBSD team for 2.1. So far it's proved to be very
stable and very efficient. I plan on hammering it a bit more this week,
but so far I'm very, very impressed.
Oh yeah, Merry Christmas to you all!
N
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