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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!darwin.sura.net!news-feed-2.peachnet.edu!umn.edu!doug.cae.wisc.edu!tillemaj From: tillemaj@cae.wisc.edu (John Edward Tillema) Subject: FreeBSD & NetBSD questions Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering Date: 6 Sep 93 21:26:59 CDT Message-ID: <1993Sep6.212700.7007@doug.cae.wisc.edu> Lines: 51 I am thinking seriously of now switching from Linux to *BSD. Basically this is because FreeBSD is the first one that has an install disk that recognizes my hard drive (a conner IDE -- Linux saw it the first time through). Couple questions though. 1. I know FreeBSD and NetBSD are similar, would there be any trouble getting FreeBSD running since it sees my HD (Neither of the kernels in NetBSD 0.8 nor 0.9 saw the HD -- though they did see the floppy which has the same controller) , and then later switching over to the NetBSD kernel? (I seem to recall seeing they were binary compatible, so programs compiled for either should work) 2. Tape Drives. Most of the drives I saw on the 386BSD FAQ were SCSI, and the others seemed to use a QIC-02 interface. What type of tape drive supports QIC-02? Will one of the drives for PC's work? (eg. Irwin, Colorado Systems(?)) I assume the ones that work off a floppy drive won't work, so that they need their own interface cards. Basically any info on tape drives that *BSD supports would be appreciated, as the only tape experience I have is with an Exabyte drive on a Sun -- If only I had the money for one of those... 5 Gigs.. 3. I haven't looked at the install steps much since 0.9 came out so I don't know if this has changed, or if it is possible even, but... One of the nice features of installing Linux was that you download the install disks to your MS-DOS partition and then boot to the linux install prompt via floppy and tell it to find the files off the MS-DOS parition and it went merrily on it's way without you having to flip disks all the time. I realize that BSD paritions the drive differently than Linux (Linux uses the MS-DOS paritions and BSD doesn't if I understand it correctly), so don't know if that would be feasible, but would be nice. 4. Emulators.... Does BSD have any DOS emulators? Linux has a fairly decent one, does BSD have one? And along the same line is anyone working on a WABI like interface for BSD? (Windows App. Binary Interface, a proposal of Sun's) And I could probably dream up some more questions, but think I'll let it go at that for now. Any help would be appreicated.. Thanks John tillemaj@cae.wisc.edu