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From: bob@reed.edu (Robert Ankeney)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: What to do now?
Message-ID: <1993Apr26.164959.4170@reed.edu>
Date: 26 Apr 93 16:49:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: reed.1993Apr26.164959.4170
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR
Lines: 32
I recently downloaded and installed 386bsd V0.1 on my 486. I got
the bin and etc distributions, figuring I wouldn't need the src
distribution to upgrade. But from the looks of things, I need that
too to install the patchkits on so I can have a "current" system.
Problem is, I don't want to use the disk space to store all that. I
had assumed there would be updated kernels I could install (I guess
this is actually the case, but not sure what kernel to get), and that
I could simply get some tar file of updated binaries. Perhaps I'm
missing something here. But what I see is talk of an upcoming *new*
distribution based on 0.2.3. Which means ftping all those files all
over again, then downloading them by modem to my PC so I can generate
all those disks... For now, I can only afford to allocate about 130
meg for BSD.
What I want is a reasonably stable system I can do some work on.
I may even have some things I can contribute in the way of utilities.
So what do I do now? Switch to NetBSD and hope it will be more stable
and easy to upgrade without having sources? Look into going with Linux?
Live with MSDOS and forget Unix ever existed? Live with what I have for
now? I don't trust 0.1, as my first experience with it was having it
crash after 20 minutes, just as I was about to coupe foure the computer
in a game of mille (you can see what kind of development work I'm likely
to be doing :-) ).
I'd appreciate any recommendations. And I hope to make some
contributions too. One thing I'm thinking about doing is porting some
code I wrote for accessing files on unmounted filesystems to DOS, so
you can read BSD files under DOS, if that would be of any value to
anyone.
Thanks,
Robert