From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Dec 18 12:21:33 1995 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id MAA17148 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 18 Dec 1995 12:21:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from elbereth.blueberry.co.uk (surfs-up.demon.co.uk [158.152.128.94]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA17127 for ; Mon, 18 Dec 1995 12:21:23 -0800 (PST) Received: (from nik@localhost) by elbereth.blueberry.co.uk (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA00234 for chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 18 Dec 1995 11:36:49 GMT From: Nik Clayton Message-Id: <199512181136.LAA00234@elbereth.blueberry.co.uk> Subject: General comments on 2.1 install To: chat@freebsd.org Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 11:36:48 +0000 () X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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 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 -- --+=[ Blueberry Hill Blueberry Design ]=+-- --+=[ http://www.blueberry.co.uk/ 1/9 Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, ]=+-- --+=[ WebMaster@blueberry.co.uk London, England, SW10 0XE ]=+--