From owner-freebsd-newbies Wed Mar 18 23:23:52 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA08209 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Wed, 18 Mar 1998 23:23:52 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from firewall.scitec.com.au (firewall-user@fgate.scitec.com.au [203.17.180.68]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA08197 for ; Wed, 18 Mar 1998 23:23:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from john.saunders@scitec.com.au) Received: by firewall.scitec.com.au; id RAA16252; Thu, 19 Mar 1998 17:23:44 +1000 (EST) Received: from mailhub.scitec.com.au(203.17.180.131) by fgate.scitec.com.au via smap (3.2) id xma016246; Thu, 19 Mar 98 17:23:32 +1000 Received: from hydra.scitec.com.au (hydra.scitec.com.au [203.17.182.101]) by mailhub.scitec.com.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id RAA01134 for ; Thu, 19 Mar 1998 17:23:32 +1000 Received: from scitec.com.au (saruman.scitec.com.au) by hydra.scitec.com.au with ESMTP (1.40.112.8/16.2) id AA213382211; Thu, 19 Mar 1998 18:23:31 +1100 Message-Id: <3510C7F4.78079D64@scitec.com.au> Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 18:23:32 +1100 From: John Saunders Organization: SCITEC LIMITED X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (WinNT; I) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hi References: <19980319173348.15569@welearn.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Sue Blake wrote: > > I've looked over Freebsd.org again and again, and have yet to find > > something like this. Being of that type that seems to be eternally poor, > > *grin* certain pieces of my hardware are stripped from where I could get > > them, for instance, an old 3-com Etherlink II card. It took me over four > > hours to figure out that I needed to do a custom installtion because > > FreeBSD was looking for the card on IRQ5, not IRQ9. It would help a bit, > > as I don't like to bug Rod over trivial stuff like that. :) That seems to be a common problem with the PC architecture. With the PCI and PnP ISA cards all this stuff can be determined automatically. However legacy ISA cards will still be an unknown quantity for the OS. For for most operating systems, having knowledge of the settings on non-PnP cards is critical to installing OK. And for operating systems that don't fully support PnP you need even more knowledge. Unless of course you have a plain standard system (no ethernet, no sound, no SCSI). There are some tricks an OS can do like probing that can be done. However there are gotchas with probes for one device clobbering another device. Windows 95 SETUP specifically detects if it gets reset during a probe so it knows the 2nd time around to skip that probe. I hope that FreeBSD will get some decent PnP support in the near future. Cheers. -- +------------------------------------------------------------+ . | John Saunders mailto:John.Saunders@scitec.com.au (Work) | ,--_|\ | mailto:john@nlc.net.au (Home) | / Oz \ | http://www.nlc.net.au/~john/ | \_,--\_/ | SCITEC LIMITED Phone +61 2 9428 9563 Fax +61 2 9428 9933 | v | "By the time you make ends meet, they move the ends." | +------------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message