From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Mar 7 9:54:16 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pemaquid.safeport.com (pemaquid.safeport.com [204.156.12.58]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D786637B400 for ; Thu, 7 Mar 2002 09:54:00 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (doug@localhost) by pemaquid.safeport.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g27Hs0x27309 for ; Thu, 7 Mar 2002 12:54:00 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from doug@safeport.com) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 12:49:36 -0500 (EST) From: To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I'm kinda happy (wasI bought your system and am not so happy!) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG This addresses only the question of the kernel being a best kept secret. Compiling a kernel is well documented If you are going to use FreeBSD (or any unix) there is a learning curve. If you know any unix variant, it not much. If you come from a windows or mac environment you should at least: read or skim the handbook. Specifically for your questions chapter 9 and A.6. I assume you already read Chap 2. ;) Then if you have specific questions about a step or when something goes wrong you will get a lot of help. The more of a computer background you have the easier the learning curve but it is different. My suggestions: 1) Greg Lehey posts: "How to get best results from FreeBSD-questions". from time-to-time. Read that. 2) Scribe to stable@freebsd.org in addition to this list 3) Assuming little or no Unix background: a) learn the file system and source trees. b) read man pages until you can understand them a bit c) /usr/.../doc has good stuff, scan that. I came to this with no Unix but a fair amount of computer/programming background. My most valuable resources were a "buddy" who helped me to get going, and Unix System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, et all. Here I would include the handbook, but I started with another of the BSDs. Aside from the occasional errors introduced by the committers (read stable), my most common errors building a kernel: 1) something changed and I did not read stable 2) clean out /usr/obj 3) make cleandir in /usr/src/sys/modules 4) clean out /usr/src/sys/compile/KERNEL (now not necessary if you follow the steps, I think). 5) I almost always use NFS to build systems so my favorite error is that /etc/make.conf does not match on the target and build systems. I have now done this enough where I no long ask on stable what went wrong :) All of that said, to build a kernel my cheat list is: Read /usr/src/UPDATING. make buildworld make buildkernel KERNCONF=client make installkernel KERNCONF=client make installworld run mergemaster and reboot Not too complex and well documented. _____ Douglas Denault doug@safeport.com Voice: 301-469-8766 Fax: 301-469-0601 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message