Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:34:39 -0500 (EST) From: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE delayed until November 20th. (fwd) Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.21.0011151734190.26431-100000@blues.jpj.net>
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I tried the custom installation option on a Packard Bell Spectria 300CDQ with just the 8 MB of RAM that are soldered to the mainboard. It seemed to hang when I went into the "5 Distributions" stage of sysinstall. The second and third time I tried, I switched to another virtual console, where a message similar to: pid 12 (sh), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space spammed the screen. I added more RAM and there was no more hanging. In the installation notes I see: In order to run FreeBSD, a recommended minimum of eight megabytes of RAM is suggested. Sixteen megabytes is the preferred amount of RAM as you may have some trouble with anything less than sixteen depending on your hardware. I had disabled all the Ethernet, tape, and SCSI drivers, leaving just the IDE ones. It seems unlikely that, if the system had SCSI instead, much more RAM would be available. Perhaps the documentation should say that more than 8 MB is needed to install (as opposed to run) FreeBSD. I had already set up some swap space, but had not "committed" it. I'm guessing that sysinstall would have taken advantage of it, if I had. If so, it'd be good if the installation notes mentioned that doing so is necessary when only 8 MB of RAM is present. Since the Spectria cannot boot from CD-ROM, I needed the installation floppies. I tried to prepare them under Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6, using the rawrite.exe from ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/FreeBSD/tools/rawrite.exe . I consistently received the error: Attempt to DMA across 64K boundary I remembered that NetBSD's rawrite has worked for me in the past. I noticed that it is available from http://www.duskware.com/rawrite32/ and now has a Windows GUI. The Web page says: Rawrite32 runs on any kind of Win32 system (i.e. Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT and Windows 2000) so it seems unsuitable for use from DOS. IMO, having rawrite--even, if necessary, two separate versions of it--on the CD would be worthwhile. Including both the versions I mentioned would only require about 160 kB of space. Providing, on the FTP site, a version that works from Windows NT, would also be worthwhile IMO. -- Trevor Johnson http://jpj.net/~trevor/gpgkey.txt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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