*BSD News Article 15296


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!uunet!nih-csl!helix.nih.gov!crtb
From: crtb@helix.nih.gov (Chuck Bacon)
Subject: Re: Future Directions for BSD (was Re: What happened to these projects ?)
Message-ID: <1993Apr28.135512.4010@alw.nih.gov>
Sender: postman@alw.nih.gov (AMDS Postmaster)
Organization: National Institutes of Health, Bethesda
References: <1993Apr26.001822.7537@knobel.GUN.de> <hastyC62oIE.BFH@netcom.com> <1rk5v8INN6vp@no-names.nerdc.ufl.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 13:55:12 GMT
Lines: 31

I second the comments of kem@cis.ufl.edu (Kelly Murray).
I'm a would-be 386bsd fanatic who's dismayed at what I found.
I built a dist.fs from the patched dist, and found that its disklabel
software scrambled the partition table (had a different opinion of how
to deal with a 240MB disk than did FDISK).  Had to use Norton Utilities
to repair the damage, and had to rebuild the DOS partition.

Next, once I had everything installed, I found that mread with the wrong
args. would light up the empty floppy drive and hang forever.  Resisted
ctrl-alt-del.

I tried using dd to read from the FD, and discovered it dumped core
upon reaching EOF on /dev/rfd0a.

When I said "extract etc01" after copying all 97 240KB chunks into /tmp,
it chugged for about fifteen minutes, and then from chunks 61 through 96
complained "cat: too many open files".

So I catted 10 chunks at a time, and built the one great etc01.cpio.Z
file.  Tried to mv the etc01.?? files out of /tmp, but mv complained
that the target was a directory!!  What the hell is going on, anyway?
OF COURSE it's a directory!  So I had to use foreach f (etc01.??) to
mv the files one by one.

I thought 386bsd derived substantially from bsd4.4, and that this was
such a superior implementation.  Is 386bsd really such a student project?

Here's hoping I ran into the only known deficiencies of 386bsd...
--
	Chuck Bacon - crtb@helix.nih.gov ( alas, not my 3b1 )-:
		ABHOR SECRECY	-   DEFEND PRIVACY