Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 13:50:06 -0600 (CST) From: joed@telecom.ksu.edu (Joe Diehl) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: 2.2-Beta install Message-ID: <199612301950.NAA24269@telecom.ksu.edu>
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Greetings, I just upgraded from FreeBSD 2.2-ALPHA to 2.2-BETA last night, install went without problem. Couple thoughts on the upgrade process: First I noticed that after upgrading to 2.2-BETA the installer failed to install a new kernel. Essentially, the upgrade wasn't finished till I recompiled my kernel. This isn't too much of a problem for me as I was going to recompile anyways, but this could present a problem for others... I'm not sure I have a recommendation here but there was a bit of a shock booting up in my recently upgraded 2.2-BETA box, type 'uname -a' I see that I'm apparently still running 2.2-ALPHA. I probably would have paniced at this when I first started using unix. ;) The big issue is in regards of what to do with /etc. The installer overwrote several if not all of the configuration files including files that shouldn't be touched like /etc/hosts, /etc/passwd, /etc/groups, etc... What I would just assume see is that the installer not touch the /etc tree at all, but instead install a file or tree (perhaps in /root) that lists the changes made to the /etc tree over various releases. At this point I can migrate changes into my files as I see necessary. I realize that perhaps differant people would have differant preferances on this, so an option on how to deal with /etc may be in order... Just a thought if you're every bored (yeah right), I made an attempt to boot off the floppy drive by booting the hard drive the specifying to boot off fd(0,a)/kernel (I tried several varients of this line). Reason for this is because I set the system up to boot on drive C: only for security reasons. The one time the boot actually started it simply scrolled errors (can't remember what they were). It would be nice not to have to dink with the system setup to boot the floppy everytime I wanted to install a new version. Though this sort of option should be password protected. But it could be beneficial for booting off say a zip drive, or cdrom (as peecees can't seem to figure out I might want to install an o/s off something other than a floppy) to do an install. Once upon a time I just about started to push for installing FreeBSD on the machines I administrated when I worked for KSU College of Engineering. I stopped short because FreeBSD didn't, and still doesn't, support those network cards; however, I can't imagine going through 100 machines and modifing the BIOS setup everytime a new version of FreeBSD comes out. Note that the College is now looking at dual booting WinNT and Linux in those labs, so it wasn't just my dreaming of putting unix out in the lab. ...Or maybe I'm just too caught up on the proms in my Sparcs at work. Things like L1-A followed by "boot cdrom".. =) Outside of /etc the upgrades of FreeBSD seem to go very smoothly. Good job. .. I invision a time where I have installed FreeBSD on the secretaries (sorry, Administrative Assistants) desktop machine and don't have to listen to "My computer locked up again *whimper*" anymore... --- Joe Diehl <joed@telecom.ksu.edu> KSU Dept. of Telecommunications
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