*BSD News Article 5425


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!goanna!minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au!rcskb
From: rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Kendall Bennett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: 386BSD - what a pain to install!
Message-ID: <1992Sep22.225256.25660@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 23 Sep 92 03:52:56 GMT
Organization: RMIT Computer Centre, Melbourne Australia.
Lines: 47

I have a small gripe about 386BSD, and trying to get the thing installed,
in a way that suits my system. Everything works ok if you want to simply
use the straight install program to get things going, but this does not
set up partitions on your disk, so you dont have a swap partition.

I decided that I wanted to try installing with a number of partitions
(small root partition, swap partition and large /usr partition), 
following the info in the FAQ. Problem is, I am not an experienced
UNIX sys admin person. Nor are the other hundreds and thousands of
DOS and OS/2 users out there who might want to start using 386BSD.

The first problem that I came across was figuring out how to set up
a disklabel for my hard disk, with partioning. The documentation for
this is hard to follow and I made the error of specifying that my
IDE drive supports bad144 mapping - OOOHHH, what a mistake! When I 
tried to newfs the partitions (now, the first time I did not newfs
the raw partitions, but the normal one like /dev/wd0a which could have
been a problem also I dont know), things hung up on me and I could not
get the system to boot at all, nor could I change the disklabel as the
system thought that the bad sector table was corrupt! Many long hours
were spent fixing this...

The second problem is with trying to newfs the system - do I newfs the
raw disks or the normal disks?

The solution to this is more helpful utilities - an interactive version
of disklabel similar to fdisk that WONT let you do stupid things that
could severly corrupt your system. Probably also a good install 
system.

Before people flame me, I intend to do something about this. I have 
run across so many problems getting 386BSD installed properly, that
I am sure lots of other MSDOS or OS/2 users out there would run into
them as well. To this end I hope to put together some more informative
installation documentation for the non-Unix neophites (I have been
using UNIX systems for 3 years, but have never done any sys admin stuff),
and work on some better installation utilities. If anyone has any 
comments or suggestions about this, please mail me...

+------------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Kendall Bennett,                         | Internet:                     |
| Advanced Computer Graphics Centre,       | kjb@godzilla.cgl.citri.edu.au |
| Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, | rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au    |
| Victoria, AUSTRALIA.                     |                               | 
+------------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
| CoSysop (Bossman), PC Connection Australia:               +61 3 688 0909 |
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