Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 20:30:12 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Alan Char" <achar@topic.mv.us.adobe.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, support@cdrom.com Subject: Re: Free BSD problems and questions Message-ID: <19333.808284612@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 11 Aug 1995 12:01:45 PDT." <9508111201.ZM1700@topic>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 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! The questions list is best, though Walnut Creek generally does their best with such questions when they cross its doorstep. I'd recommend questions first since you reach a larger pool of FreeBSD "talent" that way.. > description: I had just installed Free BSD and was configuring > things when suddenly files in /usr and /home started to disappear! This sounds like problems with your hardware, to be honest. If Windows '95 and DOS ran previously then this unfortunately doesn't really prove anything since neither OS really pushes the hardware anywhere near as hard as FreeBSD and many problems can often go unnoticed for years in such environments. I would check the following things in this order: 1. Cache timings set too fast? Cache type needs to be set to write-through instead of write-back? Some motherboards have bad DMA invalidation logic that predicates write-through caching only. 2. Proper number of wait-states (4-2-2 is good) set in BIOS? 3. SCSI controller configured properly? Proper termination? Cable looks physically OK? I've seen a number of disks eaten from improper termination (more than one device terminated on bus, etc) or a cable that was just plain marginal in quality. 4. Intel Zappa board is infamous broken version? I don't have the board IDs of the broken ones that Intel shipped, but your dealer should have that information. It was pretty well advertised at the time. > 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), I don't think that's a problem. > 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: You should be able to install it on the first disk. I suspect that Windows 95 wiped it off, as has been widely reported. > Is there a way I can change the default device on > the boot floppy? I wouldn't mind having to stick in Not easily, no.. > 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 It's generally already set that way, just not with the floppy boot blocks (unless you just hit return, in which case a complete set of defaults, including /kernel, is used). > 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. In the sources, sure! :-) > 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. No, it's just using an 8MB window out of the 4GB address space you have. Not 8MB of real 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. All of this works just fine for me. I have yet to find any incompatibilites with nvi, and I'm sort of a vi "power user" so I suspect that I'd have found them. I can't explain your problem as I use `e #' all the time with perfect success. > 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? No, I don't think so. Maybe you should just not remap that key.. :-) > 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? You need to rebuild to get pcvt, but 50 lines is quite possible with syscons. Just use the vidcontrol utility. > 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. Yes. You need apsfilter from: ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/aps-4.9delta.tar.gz This will be bundled with future releases. > 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 No, it won't be a problem. > 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! Well, there ARE known problems with the DOS filesystem code but only if you mount the fs read/write. The installation mounts it read-only by default, which doesn't cause problems. Doing significant writes to a DOS fs WILL scramble your entire filesystem's brains pretty good and we're working on this problem.. > 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? Yes. > 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. You can do this already. See the options to newfs command in the disklabel editor. > 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. Well, you could always make the mount command suid root.. :-) > 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. We've actually got a feature like this in the works! Jordan
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19333.808284612>