*BSD News Article 10670


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From: lessen@axion.bt.co.uk (Lee Essen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: [386bsd] Installation, arrrgghh!!
Message-ID: <1993Feb2.082019@axion.bt.co.uk>
Date: 2 Feb 93 08:20:19 GMT
Sender: news@axion.bt.co.uk
Reply-To: lessen@axion.bt.co.uk (Lee Essen)
Organization: British Telecom Research Labs
Lines: 88


I thought it was going to be easy!!

I'de managed to get hold of the binary distribution on floppy, and the
tinybsd and fixit disks (from the 0.2 patchkit).

Using fdisk I created a 2Meg DOS partition (just a token partition to
save having to boot of floppy). Formated this and copied DOS onto it.

So far so good!

Then I booted off the tinybsd disk! - all came up ok, the disk (Quantum
120Meg - qp120at) was recognised ok.

Ran install, selected the remaining space for 386BSD, this created the
filesystem and copied the files over to it. After pressing return to
reboot the system came up ok from the hard disk! (Still going well!)

Then came the tedious floppy loading exercise which went with no problems,
all checked out ok and installed. I was prompted for a name and after this
came the first error!!!

The shell script that extract runs does a test at the end to see if there
is another shell script in /etc. (i.e.   if [ -f /etc/<file> ] ), there
was a complaint that ']' not found. This didn't look serious since the file
didn't exist anyway so I chose to brush it under the carpet!

The system appeared to be in all the right places so I rebooted.

When the system was coming up there were seven or eight fsck errors about
unreferenced files, and the summary information was wrong! - the system
rebooted and then came up ok.

It seems that the kernel that gets installed has been stripped so 'ps'
complaines (and the core checking bits!).

The system all appeared to be fine. Then I got a message reported by
syslog...

	something like...

	wd0c: overlaps open partition (b)

Er? This wasn't a great surprise since the 'c' partition is mapped to the
entire BSD partition, which, does indeed, overlap the 'b' (swap) partition.

Why was this reported to me?


OTHER PROBLEMS:

The bsd boot record appears to be a bit 'unreliable', sometimes the system
will boot, othertimes it will just hang. Is this because I'm using the
new boot images (the ones that came with patchkit-0.2).

mdir wont work! I get a 'init: open: no such file' error! (mread is ok!!)

The serial devices (com1/com2) are /dev/com1 and /dev/com2 when installed,
yet the 'ttys' file says 'com01' and 'com02' (and so does MAKEDEV!)

I've got a UK keyboard - is there a way of changing the mappings? (The #,| and
@ keys are all in the wrong place!)

The swap size seems a bit small! - I'm thinking or forgetting about the
dos partition and doing an installation on the entire hard drive but using
my own partition information, can I just check that the following is the
way to do it...

	1. remove all partitions (and fdisk /mbr)

	2. boot fixit disk

	3. modifiy /etc/disktab with my partition info

	4. disklabel -w -r wd0 qp120at

	5. newfs the filesystems

	6. copy on the files from the tinybsd disk (commands
	   available with 'strings install')

	7. boot of the hd and continue as normal (ensuring the
	   fstab is correct!)

Is that ok?

Lee Essen.
(Someone who's lost a large amount of sleep, reinstalling, deleting, reinstalling, deleting, rein......)