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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Subject: Dr. Dobb's 386BSD Reference CD-ROM: Fraud?
Message-ID: <D04Lwp.73z@lemis.de>
Organization: LEMIS, Feldatal, Germany
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 09:48:25 GMT
Lines: 95
Well, I now have the 386BSD "Reference" CD, which with postage cost me
nearly $120, 3 times the price of the FreeBSD CD from Walnut Creek.
What did I order? In the ad in the July issue of Dr. Dobbs. it said:
- Source code (wow!)
- Annotations (could be good)
- Articles (interesting)
- Bootable CD (nice)
- Viewable in DOS/Windows (who cares?)
- Mountable as a UNIX file system (wow! again)
Do development work on the 386BSD (sic) while running the
system--whether for serious software research, or just hacking the
kernel. C and C++ libraries, X11R5 (yes, really), tools and
utilities, and on-line documentation...
To do Dr. Dobb's justice, this is also what it says on the back of the
CD-ROM. Now I don't think that are any positive points in 386BSD 1.0
that aren't in both FreeBSD 1.1 and BSD/386 1.1. The only reason I
bought this CD-ROM is for the documentation. So how do I access it?
There's a 16-page booklet of reasonably professional print quality in
the jewel box. It tells you, amongst other things, how to view the
documentation under "Windows", whatever that may be. That doesn't
help much, I don't use "Windows".
Oh well, there must be a way to access the files from UNIX. Looking
at the root directory of the CD reveals a number of "hidden"
directories:
drwxrwxr-x 2 root daemon 4096 Oct 21 02:02 .annotations
drwxrwxr-x 2 root daemon 4096 Oct 21 01:59 .articles
drwxrwxr-x 2 root daemon 4096 Oct 21 01:58 .book
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1094 Oct 21 06:56 .config
drwxrwxr-x 2 root daemon 4096 Oct 21 02:00 .manuals
-rw-r--r-- 2 root wheel 192 Oct 27 23:37 .profile
drwxrwxr-x 2 root daemon 2048 Oct 21 02:02 .ref
drwxrwxr-x 5 root daemon 2048 Oct 21 05:57 .source
This looks like the stuff. Let's look at the .articles directory:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 21724 Oct 9 10:16 bsdfit.hlp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 73046 Oct 9 10:16 c386bsd2.hlp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 45210 Oct 9 10:16 com386ke.hlp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 40612 Oct 9 10:16 comptool.hlp
What kind of suffix is .hlp? Looks like it should be some kind of
on-line help, but that's not appropriate for articles. The 'file'
program doesn't help--it just claims "data", and looking at the files
doesn't say much either.
Well, there's another possibility: on page 11 of the booklet, it tells
you you can send email to sbarnes@mfi.com asking for installation
help. Yes, you can, and I did, but after two days I still don't have
a reply.
After reading a bit between the lines, I have come to the following
conclusion:
The documentation on the CD is of sufficient interest to Dr. Dobbs
that they don't want it printed in any form. In order to prevent
this, they have embedded it in a toy (MS Windows), which is not
able to print them. This requires of the user the following, all
of which was not printed in the ads:
- Purchase of DOS and Windows
- Disk space and installation time
- Frequent reboots of the system
This all just does not sound like UNIX. I can't just take a
system down to look at documentation--my dial-in customers might
not kill me, but I wouldn't see them again.
Now, I might be wrong in this. I know as good as nothing of MS
Windows (except that the last time I tried to install it it kept
de-installing itself, crashing and performing other antisocial
behaviour). Possibly you *can* print out .hlp files. But in that
case, there should be no excuse for supplying the files only in this
format.
Two questions:
1. Is there any way to convert .hlp files to some other (UNIX)
format?
2. Is what Dr. Dobbs is doing legal? It certainly isn't
truthfulness in advertising. Over here, it would be considered
fraudulent.
My decision is clear: the disk goes back. If anybody over here in
Europe would like it, I'll send it to you instead, but I can't imagine
what use it would be to you.
--
Greg Lehey | Tel: +49-6637-1488
LEMIS | Fax: +49-6637-1489
Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany