*BSD News Article 36586


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From: knarf@nasim.cube.net (Frank Bartels)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: First impressions with FreeBSD
Date: 5 Oct 1994 22:29:30 +0100
Organization: The Sunsite for ATARI-Friends
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Hi all!

I got FreeBSD 1.1.5 up and running about two weeks ago on a 386DX-40
with 8 MB RAM.

I've chosen FreeBSD, because I've heard the serial devices are
supported very well. I'm sure NetBSD is nice, too. I don't like Linux
("hey, gimme a binary!" or "config files? diffs? hahaha!" or "my shell
uses slashes instead of backslashes as path seperator. how can I
change this?" and so on...).

The OS seems to run really stable and I've seen some nice features I
could learn to miss on my Sun with SunOS 4. ;)

After having an uptime of 12 days, the machine just rebooted without
any reports to syslog or anything else. There was nearly no load on
the machine, all I did was an rlogin to my sun and reading news. I
hope this will not happen once more...

I only have an old hercules monitor attached to this machine. I've
heard it is not possible to load fonts with this hardware. I'd like to
have ISO-8859-1 instead of this dumb IBM codepage, but this seems to
be impossible. Perhaps I find a way to change the information in the
ROM of the graphics card. Anyone ever did something like this? I don't
want to spend money in a VGA monitor only for having a usueful
charset.

A bigger problem are the cursor keys. If I rlogin to my sun the cursor
keys in `tin' or `tcsh' work fine, but they do not in `elm' or
`elvis'. I think this has something to do with the raw mode of the
terminal, where cursor keys should send different escape sequences. I
just copied the tercap-entry for `cons25' to the sun. All of these
programs are using termcap, not terminfo. Any hints?

The `vi' of FreeBSD seems to read its .exrc in the current directory
before the one in the homedirectory. I very often su to root in *my*
homedirectory and begin to hate the message "/home/knarf/.exrc: not
sourced: not owned by you". Sure, I could put the file into EXINIT,
but I don't like solutions removing the syptoms intead of the cause.
[After having a final look in the manual page:] Arghl! RTFM! "noexrc"
cured my problem.

Now something productive. I compiled GNU finger 1.37 for FreeBSD:

I'm sure this bug was reported already in gnu.utils.bug, but if you
want to type "make server", you have to apply it.

diff -ur finger-1.37.orig/Makefile.in finger-1.37/Makefile.in
--- finger-1.37.orig/Makefile.in	Thu Oct 22 00:59:40 1992
+++ finger-1.37/Makefile.in	Wed Oct  5 19:28:03 1994
@@ -51,8 +51,8 @@
 	false
 	
 server: $(AUXOBJS) $(EXECUTABLES)
-	(cd $(SRC); $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) $(CC)="$(CC)" server)
-	(cd targets; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) $(CC)="$(CC)" server)
+	(cd $(SRC); $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) CC="$(CC)" server)
+	(cd targets; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) CC="$(CC)" server)
 
 client:	$(AUXOBJS) $(EXECUTABLES)
 	(cd $(SRC); $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) CC="$(CC)" client)

I'm sure the following is *not* the correct way to remove this
multiple definition, but it works for me. I don't know what macro I
should use to comment this out. I've never seen a source which was
adapted for FreeBSD and before I begin to use -DFREEBSD I want to know
what I should use.

diff -ur finger-1.37.orig/lib/error.c finger-1.37/lib/error.c
--- finger-1.37.orig/lib/error.c	Thu Oct  1 19:55:04 1992
+++ finger-1.37/lib/error.c	Wed Oct  5 19:28:40 1994
@@ -51,10 +51,10 @@
 }
 
 /* Hack to handle previous bad setjmp (). */
-longjmperror ()
+/* longjmperror ()
 {
   exit (1);
-}
+} */ /* knarf: in setjmp.h */
 
 /* Handle some error. */
 void

GNU finger thinks utmp is always in /etc...

diff -ur finger-1.37.orig/lib/os.c finger-1.37/lib/os.c
--- finger-1.37.orig/lib/os.c	Thu Oct 22 22:01:10 1992
+++ finger-1.37/lib/os.c	Wed Oct  5 19:49:07 1994
@@ -70,7 +70,11 @@
 
 /* Where the utmp file is located. */
 #ifndef HAVE_GETUTENT
-#define UTMP_FILE "/etc/utmp"
+# ifdef _PATH_UTMP
+#  define UTMP_FILE _PATH_UTMP
+# else
+#  define UTMP_FILE "/etc/utmp"
+# endif
 #endif
 
 /* A non-null value is the address of the utmp entry which contains the

Have fun.

BTW: Why does `rup' always take so long to check out if a host is
down? I don't want to run `rwhod' for `ruptime', since my sun manualpage
says it's a network and memory hog...

Ah, and is there a passwd to master.passwd converter? I don't want to
run YP, since it's not fully supported and I'd like to automatically
add a user to the freebsd machine if there is a new user on the sun.
(I know this should not be too hard, but perhaps someone solved the
problem before).

Bye,
Knarf
-- 
    Frank Bartels    |      UUCP/ZModem: + 49 89 5469593       | MiNT is
knarf@nasim.cube.net | Login: nuucp Index: /pub/ls-lR.nasim.gz | Now TOS!