Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 12:01:45 -0700 From: "Alan Char" <achar@topic.mv.us.adobe.com> To: questions@freebsd.org, support@cdrom.com Subject: Free BSD problems and questions Message-ID: <9508111201.ZM1700@topic>
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Hi, I'm not sure if these are more appropriately asked of the Free BSD people or the Walnut Creek CD ROM people, so I'm sending to both addresses. Hopefully at least one of you will answer! I've just installed Free BSD 2.0.5 on my Pentium system, and I have one major (if somewhat difficult) question, and a bunch of minor questions. The major question is more of a problem description: I had just installed Free BSD and was configuring things when suddenly files in /usr and /home started to disappear! The most important victim was /usr/bin, after which I was more or less dead in the water. So I hit the reset button. I realize this is a somewhat vague description, but I'm afraid I can't say what, if anything in particular, triggered this disaster. After I reset, the system would not reboot. It gave a warning about the root file system not being clean, then hung (no disk activity). Here's the relevant hardware information: Pentium with an Intel Zappa board, with I believe the Triton chip set (I'll have to check the pci driver messages again.) Two Conner 2501S hard drives, SCSI ID 0 (DOS) SCSI ID 1 (Free BSD) Toshiba 3601B CD reader, SCSI ID 2 Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller A possible source of the problem is that my Sound Blaster 16 card also has a SCSI controller (the only way I could get a DSP, sigh). At first, the aic driver was detecting it and panicking, but once I disabled it (and the dozen other disk drivers I didn't need), things seemed to work okay, until the crash at least. There doesn't seem to be any problem with this setup under DOS and Windows, and Windows 95. It is NOT plugged into the SCSI bus. I could try changing some of its hardware settings, just to see if it can be moved out of harm's way, but I'm not sure it really matters, and I may move it INTO harm's way, so I'm holding off on that without a definite recommendation of what to change and where to. If this rings any bells at all and someone can offer a solution or workaround so it doesn't happen again, I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm going to re-install Free BSD this weekend and see if it happens again. (Yikes! I hope not!) Smaller issues, in no particular order: When I installed Free BSD, I asked it to install BootEasy, but apparently it installed it on the second disk, since when I boot, it still boots DOS. To boot Free BSD, I have to insert the Free BSD boot floppy and type sd(1,a)/kernel. In this light, I have these questions: Can I install BootEasy on my DOS disk, and will it work if I do? In particular, I'm wondering if it will it work with Windows 95, who seems to be doing weird boot things. Is there a way I can change the default device on the boot floppy? I wouldn't mind having to stick in the floppy to boot Free BSD, but it's a pain to have to sit there while it's booting so I can type the name of the device. Also, is there a way to have a default kernel name so that I can only type the device, without having to add the /kernel? This seems to be standard practice on this flavor of UNIX booters, I'm surprised it's not already built in. For that matter, it would nice if there were default partition numbers, so that I could just say sd(1). Again, this seems to be standard on most UNIX booters. Are the options to the boot/kernel documented anywhere? I couldn't find it in the boot_i386 man page, the only one I could find mentioned anywhere is -c for UserConfig. I'm guessing the -s is single-user mode, since that's pretty standard, but it would be interesting to know what the others are. When I booted off floppy, it says to boot using hd(1,a)/kernel if sd and wd are both installed, or something like that. Not knowing what it was talking about, I tried that, and it started to boot Free BSD, but after going through all the drivers, it wanted to change root to /dev/sd0a instead of /dev/sd1a, so it failed. I figured out later that I could boot by saying sd(1,a)/kernel, but was this earlier problem a bug or a feature? Maybe the message should change to be more informative, or less misleading? When I boot, it says that the PCI driver is using 8 megabutes of memory! Is this real memory? That seems excessive, even if I do have 32 Mbytes of memory. When I run vi, it says my terminal doesn't have a # key. I like to map this key to ^^, since it's normally not used by vi. (Similarly, I like to map g to ^].) Why does vi think I don't have a # key? Speaking of #, I tried typing in ':e #' to vi and it said that it had nothing to substitute for '#', but I had just ':e'-ed from another file. Has nvi changed the meaning of '#'? I hope not. Is there a vi that's more compatible with classic vi around? I'm starting to feel uneasy feeling about nvi. I was thinking that maybe I could work around this problem by having the virtual console run in vt220 mode. Do you think this would help? Is it true that I need to rebuild the kernel to do this? Also, I wouldn't mind if the consoles had more lines, since I have a fairly large screen. I've seen documentation that this is possible onthe pcvt man page, but no explanation really on how. Kernel rebuild? I have an HP DeskJet 540 printer, which I bought for DOS, not thinking about Unix, unfortunately, or else I would have spent the extra $$$ for a laser printer. Is there a driver for this printer, especially one that supports color? I tried just sending text to /dev/lpt1 using lpr, but that didn't seem to work. It did make the light on my printer blink, its only form of communication, and not a very useful one at that. I saw somewhere (release notes?) that the MSDOS file system may not work with file systems for DOS after 3.3. I have DOS 6.2.2. Will this be a problem? It seemed to mount okay, but I was a little wary of doing much. By the way, it was mounted when things started to disappear in /usr. It would be bad if the MSDOS file system caused other file systems to scramble a completely different disk! Is there a way to turn off the csh warning that there are relative paths in $path when it's run by root? I can prevent it from exporting any in my .cshrc, but I can do little about importing. If the very first line in my .cshrc sets $path to something without relative names, will that supress the importing warning? Wish list: It would be nice when making partitions if I could pass parameters to newfs. In particular, I like to make the "root only" percentage zero on all but the root file system, and I like to increase the blocks-per-inode value. I think I will probably have to back things up and remake file systems after installation to be able to do this. It would be nice if non-root people could mount removable media, or at least floppies. Although CD's would be nice, too. It would also be nice if someone did the auto-mounting feature for these devices, the way they are on System V. Speaking of System V, it would also be nice if there were a way to put entries in /etc/fstab that aren't automatically mounted so I could say "mount /cdrom" when I want to do that. Okay, so it's a one-line shell script, but still, it would be nice. I have lots of these one-line shell scripts, like mountcd, mountfd, mountdos. I'll probably want to make read-only versions of the last two. And I will have to make some more if my Iomega Zip drive ever arrives. Thanks for the help. --Alan Char, (415) 962-3939, achar@adobe.com P.S. FYI, Free BSD is for my personal use, not for work.
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