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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!goanna!minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au!rcskb From: rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Kendall Bennett) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: 386BSD - what a pain to install! Message-ID: <1992Sep22.225256.25660@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au> Date: 23 Sep 92 03:52:56 GMT Organization: RMIT Computer Centre, Melbourne Australia. Lines: 47 I have a small gripe about 386BSD, and trying to get the thing installed, in a way that suits my system. Everything works ok if you want to simply use the straight install program to get things going, but this does not set up partitions on your disk, so you dont have a swap partition. I decided that I wanted to try installing with a number of partitions (small root partition, swap partition and large /usr partition), following the info in the FAQ. Problem is, I am not an experienced UNIX sys admin person. Nor are the other hundreds and thousands of DOS and OS/2 users out there who might want to start using 386BSD. The first problem that I came across was figuring out how to set up a disklabel for my hard disk, with partioning. The documentation for this is hard to follow and I made the error of specifying that my IDE drive supports bad144 mapping - OOOHHH, what a mistake! When I tried to newfs the partitions (now, the first time I did not newfs the raw partitions, but the normal one like /dev/wd0a which could have been a problem also I dont know), things hung up on me and I could not get the system to boot at all, nor could I change the disklabel as the system thought that the bad sector table was corrupt! Many long hours were spent fixing this... The second problem is with trying to newfs the system - do I newfs the raw disks or the normal disks? The solution to this is more helpful utilities - an interactive version of disklabel similar to fdisk that WONT let you do stupid things that could severly corrupt your system. Probably also a good install system. Before people flame me, I intend to do something about this. I have run across so many problems getting 386BSD installed properly, that I am sure lots of other MSDOS or OS/2 users out there would run into them as well. To this end I hope to put together some more informative installation documentation for the non-Unix neophites (I have been using UNIX systems for 3 years, but have never done any sys admin stuff), and work on some better installation utilities. If anyone has any comments or suggestions about this, please mail me... +------------------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Kendall Bennett, | Internet: | | Advanced Computer Graphics Centre, | kjb@godzilla.cgl.citri.edu.au | | Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, | rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au | | Victoria, AUSTRALIA. | | +------------------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | CoSysop (Bossman), PC Connection Australia: +61 3 688 0909 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+