*BSD News Article 33410


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From: tom@wpzd07.pzlc.uni-wuerzburg.de (Thomas Heiling)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: (Bug)Report on FreeBSD-Installation LONG
Date: 29 Jul 1994 11:45:00 GMT
Organization: University of Wuerzburg, Germany
Lines: 144
Message-ID: <31aq3s$mo1@winx03.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: wpzd07.pzlc.uni-wuerzburg.de
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

Hello this is a ( long ) report of problems with the installation
of FreeBSD-1.5.1 RELEASE.

Last week I got a new 420 MB hard disc and a SMC Elite Ultra
Ethernet card, and I decided to give FreeBSD a try. ( I have
only Linux and some NetBSD-0.9 experience )

I tried the Installation on a 386/40 MHZ with 8 MB,
two Ethernet card ( a HP Ethercard and an SMC Ultra ).
After the first 2 hours, I was still unable to get this
working -> So I took the old 8 bit HP Ethernet card out,
and now the Installation works o.k.

Here is a summary of encountered problems :

1. syscons
	- After some time the characters became unreadable.
	  ( No Screensaver active ). I must manually load the
	  font again.
	- German Keyboard
	  I tried both iso and cp850 keyboard tables, but was unable
	  to get the "'" and the "`" character.
	  This is annouying for shell quoting.
	  I found no solution, how to get this working.
2. Programs which are not in the bindist, but in the srcdist
	zic, unfortunately I haven't found updatedb, it is under
	/usr/libexec as locate.updatedb
3. Problems with the setup
	- There is not enough space on the root Directory to save
	  a kernel core dump. ( Don't  ask how I know this ! )
	  I have done a mkdir /usr/crash and symbolic linked this
	  to /var/crash
	- I have made a /usr/tmp directory for temporary space
	  and added a setenv TMPDIR=/usr/tmp. Without this big
	  packages won't fit in the default /var/tmp.
	- If you want online reference for /usr/share/doc with
	  tbl ?.T | groff -Tascii -ms -o1- there is a
	  "Missing font S error" and you cannot look at the manual.
4. Problems with XFree Setup
 	- I searched endless for the name of the mouse device.
 	  Most irritating was the kernel startup messages, which 
 	  said sio Device found, but the actual name of the
 	  device is tty00.
5. Configuring the Kernel
	If you want more virtual consoles you must run gettys on
	these. But the new devices aren't there, you must make
	them with mknod, and then recreate the device database.
	BTW I don't think I would have found out, how to configure
	the Kernel without the book from Nemeth,Snyder , because
	the part for the i386 is missing in the system managers
	manual.
6. Real World examples - Building PVM
	Parallel Virtual Machine is a known application, there is
	a target BSDI386, so simple "make". 
	Everything o.k.,but "No xdr_float",at the linkstep.
	I thought I have forgotten to link -lrpcsvc, but no - same
	error as before.
	So I looked at the source code of the libs, in libc/rpc the
	xdr_float is UNSUPPORTED.
	So I decided to build all sources from scratch, with
	xdr_float included.
6.a) Building the Whole universe - Make world
	I saw now information about how to do a complete rebuild from
	the system. Looked in the Makefile and decided a "make world"
	should do this.
	You get Warnings in : lipthread, libm
	And the build dumps core in libg++, so what ? -
	I give up for now, it is friday and I start in the weekend,
	maybe next week I will try again.

/*****************************************************************/
/*                                                               */
/*         My personal opininions                                */
/*                                                               */
/* DON'T READ FURTHER - THIS SHOULD NOT LEAD TO A FLAME WAR      */
/*                                                               */
/*****************************************************************/



So , You are still here ?

- FreeBSD Installation is not easy, but relative forward.
  You must have a very good knowledge about BSD.

- I have not found out, how to get my keyboard going.
  This means right characters and manually loading fonts.

- Acessing DOS-Partitions is more difficult than a mount -t msdos

- Without Net access and / or a CD-ROM you are totally helpless,
  because you *need* and *want* other software.
  Only the bindist and the srcdist is not enough, you need many
  more software.

  You want XFree, so the minimum you must have is
  install floppies,bindist,srcdist,XFree. ( And XFree is not packaged
  for floppies ).
  Next you need top, syscons_extra,mtools and the whole Xview package.

  Now for some applications :
  As a minimum you need electronic mail and a Newsreader, e.g.
  elm and tin, but you must compile this yourself.
  On the Internet you need elm,tin,gopher and lynx for ascii-based
  systems.

  For mathematical work I need gnuplot,xvgr and some libraries.
  In every bin package I saw - eispack linpack blas - there are no
  manual pages, so you need at least the source for the manual pages.

  For normal work I need a shell with an interactive history, I think
  it is so much easier to interactive edit the commandline than to
  do a ^blah^fasel^ or :s/blah/fasel/. So include tcsh bash or ksh.

  Next I need something for writing. For me this is LaTeX, because
  I know no other software for UniX which is free.

  For a small system like this you must strip XFree, this means
  you must use fvwm as windowmanager and rxvt as term, but for
  this you need libxpm.

  You want ghostscript and ghostview, so you can have a look at the
  Manuals SMM,PS1 and USD.

My conclusion :

	If you have knowledge about BSD, and you have net acess
	and are willing to make every single machine for yourself,
	then it is o.k.
	If you want a complete Distribution - without source -,
        but with most available free software it is much easier to
        go with Linux. There is much less work involved to setup a 
        system in a small time.

Thomas

--
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Thomas Heiling Pharmacist & Doctorate at 
Pharmazeutisches Institut Uni Wuerzburg - Germany 
Email phar006@rzbox.uni-wuerzburg.de (HP-UX)
      tom@wpzd07.pzlc.uni-wuerzburg.de (Linux)
or phar006@vax.rz.uni-wuerzburg.de ( VAX )
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