From: philsuth@mycroft.DIALix.oz.au (phil sutherland)
Subject: 386BSD - my first 2 days
Reply-To: philsuth@DIALix.oz.au
Organization: Yes
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 03:24:12 GMT
Summary: Excellent!!!

Gentle netfolk,

Here's a success story, to provide a little bit of a change from
problem reports/fixes and endless wrangling on the USL/BSDI lawsuit.

Last Saturday I joyfully sacrificed 200Mb worth of SCO filesystems,
and got 386BSD up and running on my computer. The whole affair went
really smoothly, thanks to heaps of help during the early installation
from someone who'd been through the whole process far too many times
himself (Greetings, Comrade!). Hardware configuration was as follows:-

	386DX 25MHz(uncached) C&T chipset
	8Mb memory
	Adaptec 1542B SCSI controller
	Quantum PS210S (200Mb) drive
	3.5" floppy drive
	EGA
	WD8003E ethernet card

We did the installation via the ethernet from another 386BSD machine,
and the only snag hit was the known problem with the conflicting
Isolan driver in the kernel causing the WD Ethernet card to not
communicate. We ftp'd a different initial kernel and it was almost
boring from there on in! The installation was a custom job, as I
wanted a decent amount of swap space and several filesystems.  The
whole exercise took about 4.5 hours. I've still got to pick up the
etc01 distribution, though.

On Sunday I got down to some serious fun. Firstly (and most
important for a vi hater like me!) I got Gnu Emacs 18.58 ported. 
That went fairly smoothly - the only compilation error was due to
slightly different FILE structures in stdio.

I then recompiled the kernel to prove I could (only snag was the
well-known vers.c problem), and then made a few alterations to
pccons.c (the console device driver) to make the keyboard a little
more emacs-friendly. [Details and patches by email if anyone's
interested]. I also built in the updated in_cksum.c that Bakul Shah
posted a day or two back. Haven't tested that yet, though, as my
ethernet transciever is off doing important work elsewhere....

I then installed and tried working with an Archive 5945C tape drive
on an SC-499 controller. This is a 60Mb unit, which doesn't work with
the standard wt.c. Dan Muntz's modified wt.c worked, albiet very
slowly - but he warned that that would be the case (Thanks, Dan!).

My next moves will be to get sendmail and uucp configured, 
and cnews, nn, and elm ported. At that stage, I'll be ready to place
ultimate faith in 386BSD 0.1, as I transfer my day to day connectivity
with the world to it. uucp that is, I don't have a Real Link (tm) yet.

Gee, I haven't had this much fun since I first got my fingers on a
U**x system. Thanks Bill, Lynne, and the host of others....

phil (new and fanatical convert)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 phil sutherland                 | Clothed in facts 
 perth, western australia        | truth feels oppressed;
---------------------------------| in the garb of poetry
      philsuth@DIALix.oz.au      | it moves easy and free. 
---------------------------------|                   -- Rabindranath Tagore
				 ------------------------------------------
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 phil sutherland                 | Clothed in facts 
                                 | truth feels oppressed;
---------------------------------| in the garb of poetry