From owner-freebsd-current Sat Apr 1 03:35:41 1995 Return-Path: current-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id DAA05265 for current-outgoing; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 03:35:41 -0800 Received: from aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw ([140.109.40.248]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id DAA05257 for ; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 03:35:36 -0800 Received: (from taob@localhost) by aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw (8.6.11/8.6.9) id TAA13313; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 19:19:28 +0800 Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 19:19:27 +0800 (CST) From: Brian Tao To: FREEBSD-CURRENT-L Subject: New installation notes Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: current-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I just spent the better part of my Saturday afternoon helping a colleague get started with FreeBSD. 90% of the problems were, as usual, due to the idiosyncratic PC hardware architecture. ;-) I want to fire off this note while the experience is still fresh in my mind because there are a few things that can be improved upon. Hardware is a 90-MHz Pentium, ASUS motherboard (not sure which one, but it uses the SiS chipset), Adaptec AHA-2940 controller, two Quantum Maverick 540-meg drives (sd0 is FreeBSD, sd1 is MS-DOS), Accton NE2000-compatible Ethernet, Phoenix Vision864 S3 PCI graphics card (1 megabyte) and 16 megabytes of RAM. Initially the kernel was having trouble with the 2940, reportings errors during boot such as "cmd fail" or "ahc0: board not responding". After fiddling with the system for half an hour, it was finally able to boot up to the installation stage. I'm not quite sure what I did to make it work. I suspect it may have something to do with changing its IRQ from 12 to 10, and/or pulling out the SB/AWE32 sound card (which is on IRQ 5) and the attached NEC Multispin 4x CD-ROM drive. When the installer finally did come up, both drives showed up as sd0 and sd1 with the expected partitioning. I fdisked sd0 and told it to use the entire drive for FreeBSD. However, when I went to disklabel sd0, it defaulted with an MSDOS partition (sd0e) the size of the entire slice. I deleted it and then went to allocate the filesystems. Was I supposed to leave a small MS-DOS filesystem for the boot manager? My intention was to have the boot manager come up and ask me to select DOS (booting off the second drive) or BSD (booting off the first drive). Is this possible, and if so, how do I specify this? Does it have something to do with importing an MS-DOS disk slice as a FreeBSD partition? Currently, the computer boots straight into FreeBSD. After the disklabelling, I chose an NFS install. Everything went smoothly up to point where it asks for the pathname to the dist files. I typed in an incorrect pathname, it said it couldn't find the files, then proceeded to the final step! Would it be possible to have it loop back to the package selection routine or (better yet) prompt the user again for a pathname? I restarted the installer, went through the same questions about network parameters, but again I made a small typo (so I'm stupid, but that's not the issue ;-)). I didn't feel like doing it all over again, so I just dropped to a shell and completed the rest of the install by hand. Better error handling, IMHO, would go a long way towards dispelling FreeBSD's hard-to-install reputation. For example, if I type in the wrong IP address or hostname, I have to start all over again to correct one mistake. Or if the network card's IRQ doesn't match what's in the kernel, ifconfig will fail with repeated "device timeout" errors. Could the installer catch these errors and handle them gracefully? Once everything was installed, I rebooted with kernel -c (to accomodate ed1 on IRQ 15), edited a handful of /etc files, rebooted again and created the user accounts. All in all, pretty smooth sailing once the kernel could recognize the Adaptec. I ran iozone to check it out but it could only muster around 1.7MB/sec read/write while my 486DX4/100 NCR-equipped system hits 2.5-2.6MB/sec. Both used "iozone 50 65536" and were handling a normal multiuser load with no swapping occurring. I need to recompile the kernel anyway and I'll try Justin's new aic7xxx drivers at the same time. BTW, the proud owner is thoroughly impressed with what he can do with his machine now. :) In fact, he hinted that wiping out his MS-DOS drive and replacing it with more UNIX file space is a definite possibility. :) -- Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org