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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!newshost.marcam.com!news.mathworks.com!news2.near.net!satisfied.elf.com!usenet From: *Hobbit* <hobbit@asylum.sf.ca.us> Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Subject: A host of freebsd bugs Date: 18 Jan 1995 23:09:37 EST Organization: large Lines: 59 Sender: root Approved: God Expires: 1 Apr 95 12:34 Message-ID: <3fkp1d$2r2@satisfied.elf.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: asylum.sf.ca.us Running into all of these within the first few hours of attempting to install FreeBSD 2.0-950112-SNAP does *not* give me a very good impression. I've bloodied my forehead against a variety of unix install scripts over the years, but this one especially pissed me off. And I *did* read a whole mess of FAQage before going anywhere near the boot disk. The boot manager WRITES into the MBR freely. Bad design. Causes trouble with virus-preventive BIOSes, and crapping into the hard drive before your real OS is up, fscked, and running is poor practice at best. I suggest LILO as an example of something better. The cpio set I pulled down is buggered somehow; when sysinstall invokes "gunzip < /dev/fd0 | cpio -idum", gunzip returns 2 instead of 0 because of "trailing junk". The cpio set is actually intact, but this causes sysinstall to assume it failed completely. Someone else recently complained about this too, so it's a genuine problem. I eventually worked around it using the -RELEASE cpio set. The mapping of MBR partitions to Freebsd filesystems is completely unclear. How, for instance, was I supposed to know that the DOS partition on the second hard drive was /dev/rwd1e?! I found it by pure accident. When I was finally able to tell sysinstall to look in the aforementioned DOS filesystem for the binary install kit, giving it the directory wasn't good enough because it then looks for "%s/bindist" as an unchangeable filename, but oops, I had named it "fbsd" or something. Don't hardwire pathnames into this sort of thing. There is no way to get a SHELL out of the earlier stages of sysinstall to try and fix any of this. "mount" doesn't tell you the filesystem *types* that are mounted, which is often useful to know. "mtools" should be in the default binary distribution, to make it easier for folks to deal with DOS floppies. The big blinking block cursor is annoying, and I haven't figured out how to change it or the keymapping yet. [Details welcome.] The kernel I got out of the abovementioned distribution has the <no_am> floppy controller bug that someone recently mentioned. In fact, I can now tell which kernel has the bug or not while it's booting, because I can *hear* it sort of oddly gronkulate the floppy drive while probing it. It gets gronked badly enough that the BIOS thinks the floppy is out to lunch even after a hard reset. My first inclination here is to just launch the whole thing and install Linux instead, but I'd really like to stick with it long enough to get around these problems and maybe offer helpful suggestions for how the release is packaged. I *can't* be the only person running into these things; I pulled down the "obvious" stuff, and it fails miserably out of the box. I'll give it credit for one thing, though: the partitioning stuff is straightforward and works well. Or maybe I've just partitioned too many disks... _H*