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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!col.hp.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!sundog.tiac.net!usenet From: Alan Bawden <alan@lcs.mit.edu> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Download question Date: Sat, 30 Dec 1995 20:37:03 -0500 Organization: ITS Preservation Society Lines: 34 Message-ID: <30E5E93F.41C67EA6@lcs.mit.edu> References: <4c2qon$sjr@shellx.best.com> <4c3i8l$139@uriah.heep.sax.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.119.96.100 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b4 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE i386) J Wunsch wrote: > mikane@shellx.best.com (Michael Landeros) writes: > > I want to download freebsd from the NET. I know where the ftp > > sites are but I am a bit confused about which files I should > > download. If anyone has done this lately I would appreciate some > > advice. > > At first, only download the installation floppy (from > ../floppies/boot.flp), boot it, and read the instructions. And after he does that he'll still be mostly in the dark about what many of those files are. For example, in XF86312 the files XF86-co.tgz and XF86-xc.tgz are each over 30 megabytes, but nothing in the instructions on the boot floppy will specifically mention those files by name, so there's no way to be certain what the consequences are of not including them. Some early warning in a README file in the FTP directory could save people a lot of trouble lugging those 60 megabytes all through the install process only to discover at the very end that they don't really need them. commerce and xperimnt are also quite large and perhaps not very vital. For someone doing the install via DAT tape (such as myself) it would be nice to have just a -little- bit of help about what I -really- needed to put on that tape. The entire distribution runs something like 220 megabytes, but without the X sources, commerce and xperimnt, you only need something like 90 megabytes. That difference would have saved me a lot of effort. (But let me add: the FreeBSD installation process is otherwise extremely well done!) -- Alan Bawden Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU 617/492-7274 06BF9EB8FC4CFC24DC75BDAE3BB25C4B