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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!col.hp.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD Impression Date: 31 Dec 1995 10:13:36 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 50 Message-ID: <4c5nog$6t0@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4a6vve$l46@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu> <RDONG.95Dec8133059@chow.uci.edu> <4bekgn$go9@news1.wing.net> <4bh5vi$naq@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4bk0t7$nnq@mark.ucdavis.edu> <4blet7$hen@pell.pell.chi.il.us> <4bm2ke$3ur@mark.ucdavis.edu> <4c4odr$6pe@pell.pell.chi.il.us> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 orc@pell.chi.il.us (Orc) writes: > I've not seen the 2.1.0 install yet. I'm told it's better than > the 2.0.5 install, so some of my criticisms may be out of date. They are, somewhat. :) > The two things which still stick in my mind as annoyances are > the disk labelling and the system not autoprobing for some > devices. The disk labelling is, after dealing with one of the > modern Linux installs, somewhat of a leap back into the 70s; It > took me a couple times around the loop of > partition/attempt-to-go-and-install before I remembered just why > labelling was there; [...] The disk labelling has been improved drastically, though it's still mostly usable during installation (while it ideally should also be later to add another disk). > The autoprobing was a continual pain, because I keep > my scsi drivers and lance ethernet cards at, apparently, > nonstandard locations, and having to manually go in and set up the > i/o ports, dma, and irqs [...] Alas, the ISA architecture hasn't been designed for something like autoprobing in the first place, so you always risk to stamp on the toes of some other (or even unkown) device by attempting to auto- probe. (EISA and PCI are better in this respect.) In particular, you mentioned io address 0x300 which is actually a bitch: several dozens cards come with this one being the default, so it's virtually impossible to auto-probe some device on it. You could always find 10 machines where this auto-probe will kill some hardware for just your machine where the auto-probe works. BSD has been designed for auto-probing (years ago!), but PC hardware has not! However, FreeBSD 2.1 comes with an improved UserConfig, called `visual' UserConfig, i.e. if you are booting on a supported console (graphics console, or VT100-compliant serial console), you can dig through the kernel settings with the arrow keys. This is after booting with the -c option, and you have to type `visual' first (the old non-visual UserConfig is the default, otherwise there would be no way out for non-supported consoles). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)