Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 19:19:27 +0800 (CST) From: Brian Tao <taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw> To: FREEBSD-CURRENT-L <freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org> Subject: New installation notes Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.91.950401184804.1567a-100000@aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw>
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I just spent the better part of my Saturday afternoon helping a
colleague get started with FreeBSD. 90% of the problems were, as
usual, due to the idiosyncratic PC hardware architecture. ;-) I want
to fire off this note while the experience is still fresh in my mind
because there are a few things that can be improved upon.
Hardware is a 90-MHz Pentium, ASUS motherboard (not sure which
one, but it uses the SiS chipset), Adaptec AHA-2940 controller, two
Quantum Maverick 540-meg drives (sd0 is FreeBSD, sd1 is MS-DOS),
Accton NE2000-compatible Ethernet, Phoenix Vision864 S3 PCI graphics
card (1 megabyte) and 16 megabytes of RAM.
Initially the kernel was having trouble with the 2940, reportings
errors during boot such as "cmd fail" or "ahc0: board not responding".
After fiddling with the system for half an hour, it was finally able
to boot up to the installation stage. I'm not quite sure what I did
to make it work. I suspect it may have something to do with changing
its IRQ from 12 to 10, and/or pulling out the SB/AWE32 sound card
(which is on IRQ 5) and the attached NEC Multispin 4x CD-ROM drive.
When the installer finally did come up, both drives showed up as
sd0 and sd1 with the expected partitioning. I fdisked sd0 and told it
to use the entire drive for FreeBSD. However, when I went to
disklabel sd0, it defaulted with an MSDOS partition (sd0e) the size of
the entire slice. I deleted it and then went to allocate the
filesystems. Was I supposed to leave a small MS-DOS filesystem for
the boot manager? My intention was to have the boot manager come up
and ask me to select DOS (booting off the second drive) or BSD
(booting off the first drive). Is this possible, and if so, how do I
specify this? Does it have something to do with importing an MS-DOS
disk slice as a FreeBSD partition? Currently, the computer boots
straight into FreeBSD.
After the disklabelling, I chose an NFS install. Everything went
smoothly up to point where it asks for the pathname to the dist files.
I typed in an incorrect pathname, it said it couldn't find the files,
then proceeded to the final step! Would it be possible to have it
loop back to the package selection routine or (better yet) prompt the
user again for a pathname? I restarted the installer, went through
the same questions about network parameters, but again I made a small
typo (so I'm stupid, but that's not the issue ;-)). I didn't feel
like doing it all over again, so I just dropped to a shell and
completed the rest of the install by hand.
Better error handling, IMHO, would go a long way towards
dispelling FreeBSD's hard-to-install reputation. For example, if I
type in the wrong IP address or hostname, I have to start all over
again to correct one mistake. Or if the network card's IRQ doesn't
match what's in the kernel, ifconfig will fail with repeated "device
timeout" errors. Could the installer catch these errors and handle
them gracefully?
Once everything was installed, I rebooted with kernel -c (to
accomodate ed1 on IRQ 15), edited a handful of /etc files, rebooted
again and created the user accounts. All in all, pretty smooth
sailing once the kernel could recognize the Adaptec. I ran iozone to
check it out but it could only muster around 1.7MB/sec read/write
while my 486DX4/100 NCR-equipped system hits 2.5-2.6MB/sec. Both used
"iozone 50 65536" and were handling a normal multiuser load with no
swapping occurring. I need to recompile the kernel anyway and I'll
try Justin's new aic7xxx drivers at the same time.
BTW, the proud owner is thoroughly impressed with what he can do
with his machine now. :) In fact, he hinted that wiping out his
MS-DOS drive and replacing it with more UNIX file space is a definite
possibility. :)
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org
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