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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.OZ.AU!summer
From: summer@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Mark Summerfield)
Subject: Install+patch: THANKS, comments, questions...
Message-ID: <9309418.24038@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Organization: Dept of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1993 08:21:47 GMT
Lines: 66
Well, six days ago I didn't even have my pc yet. Now I do, and it has a
DOS partition, and a 386bsd partition (a nonstandard installation) both
happily coexisting, and running fine. I installed 386bsd from scratch,
(well, the bindist and srcdist -- I haven't got to the etcdist yet),
patched it, and configured and compiled my own kernel, then compiled
the patched src tree. And despite all that I've seen posted here, aside
from problems *I* caused as I was learning, and that "mkdep" thing with
the g++ library, I didn't have a problem!! My patched kernel even
survived the nearly 5 hour compile of the source tree without a hiccup.
So, instead of reporting bugs/problems I'd like to THANK everyone who
helped out. Those who did so directly know who they are, I assume, so I
won't mention them here. Special thanks to Jordan and Rodney -- the patchkit
does seem to work, for the most part, and installing the patches was really
easy (not what I'd expected from some of the postings I'd read). The
instructions seem clear and helpful to me.
I do have a few quick questions and comments:
1) If there really are bugs in the source tree, why wasn't I hit by them?
I notice Rodney has owned up to a few, so I just used "find" to
make sure everything installed was new as of this morning, which it
was (with explicable exceptions), so I assume the compile/install worked.
2) If someone could point me to some good documentation on the date/time
system I'd be grateful -- I still don't really understand how
/etc/localtime and the kernel timezone interact to produce the correct
time (so my clock's six hours off!). I also don't know how to make
sure that local daylight saving periods are configured correctly.
Is there an editor for those /usr/share/timezone/... files?
3) I'm not happy with the standard installation procedure for manual
pages. The way I figure it, I have at least two copies of every man
page -- the nroff one in the src tree, and the formated one. In some
cases there is a third, because even after a "make clean" in /usr/src
some of the c library pages remain in the /usr/obj tree (incidentally,
is there a legitimate way of completely cleaning this tree?
rm -r /usr/obj is tempting! :-) What I'd much rather do is put
links to the src tree into /usr/share/man/man?, and let man format
each page when and if I first read it. I can obviously do this
myself, but it would be nice to have it as an option on the build
procedure.
4) Again on the subject of saving disk space, is it OK to delete all
the *.pl* files once the patching process is complete, and I'm happy
that everything has gone OK? Or are they used if I ever want to
deinstall a patch?
5) A quick tip for anybody planning on doing a custom installation as
described in the FAQ: as a first-timer with disk partitioning and
stuff, I found it really instructive to run a standard install,
boot the fixit floppy, and examine my hard disk with disklabel,
then take it from there. Also, I think a really big print entry
about which partitions are used for swap, whole disk, and whole
disk used by 386bsd is an absolute MUST for the new FAQ! :-)
Again, thanks -- I'm really happy with my system so far. I hope I've
been constructive here: that is certainly my intention!
Mark.
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Mark Summerfield, Photonics Research Laboratory
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne
ACSnet[AARN/Internet]: summer@ee.mu.oz[.au]
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The thing about death is that getting there is half the fun!