From: sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com (Steven J. Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
Subject: Re: Coherent 4.0.1; some bad things
Date: 12 Aug 92 18:30:32 GMT
	<9208120959.AA01930@dalek.mwc.com>
Reply-To: sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com
Organization: Bull HN, Worldwide Information Systems, Billerica, Mass., USA

In article <9208120959.AA01930@dalek.mwc.com> bob@dalek.mwc.com (Bob Hemedinger) writes:
#> [installation-tale-of-woe by sje]
#
# Of the equipment we've worked with... our stuff at mwc, our beta testers',
# our personal home systems... no one experienced these problems. To see
# problems arise that we had no way to anticipate is not surprising, in
# many respects, we've been through before... with IDE drives. We're
# doing our best to work these problems out, but it is difficult to do so when we
# can not duplicate the problem in house.

If you have a potential fix for systems like mine that you want to
try, just send me the disk.  As long as it doesn't blow away any
hard-to-replace files on my hard drive, I'd be glad to help test it.
I now see that I made a mistake by not signing up as a beta tester
early this year.

# We aren't making excuses, we are working on resolving this.

#> 9) CURSES failure; some PD software (chess from mwcbbs) that uses
#> curses will run properly only if it is NOT recompiled under 4.0.1; the
#> recompilation reports no errors but produces bizzare output.
                                                ^^^^^^^ bizarre
#
# 4.0 has 2 curses libraries. libcurses.a is terminfo curses, libtermcap.a
# is termcap based curses. Try to compile this with -ltermcap.

Will do tonight.  A lot of makefiles will need changing.  I also tried
recompiling Udo Munk's rogue port both with its internal curses and
with the 4.0 curses library; they linked but crashed under 4.0.1,
perhaps the termcap library will help here also.  The old 3.2 binary
works fine.

#> 10) Although advertised as "32 addressing compatible", 4.0.1 only
#> handles 24 bits and will not access above 16 Mbyte no matter how much
#> memory your system has.  This has been discussed before, but I thought
#> it might be fixed by now.  For those with doubts about the need for
#> fat memories, I suggest a review of the last decade's history and the
#> growth in PC memory capacity.  My machine allows for 32 Mbytes without
#> any expansion cards (another 32 Mbytes there), and many motherboards
#> allow from 64 to 256 Mbytes.
#
# IBM designed their (ISA) hardware such that DMA above 16Megs isn't possible,
# hence, Coherent 4.0 has this limit. EISA machines are a different
# story. We hope to have this limit removed for EISA machines for 4.1.

Well, this isn't the full story.  True, there are problems with
accessing ISA cards because of the addressing limit.  However, a
little cleverness with writing I/O drivers can circumvent this.  The
idea is to keep DMA transfers in the appropriate region; a little
double buffering should work.  Remember, the memory is NOT on the ISA
bus.  After all, MS-DOS (yuk!)  5.0 had no problem using all 20 Mbytes
on my ISA box.  I expect at least the same from MWC.

However, I agree that this is probably a lower priority than
regularizing the installation or providing an ANSI C compiler with
appropriate FPU support.

#> 12) The terminfo subsystem is introduced; a good idea.  But where are
#> the tic source files?  How can I modify the terminfo for ansipc if I
#> can't find the source?
#
# The terminfo entries were built from the termcap entries in /etc/termcap.
# You can decode a terminfo file with infocmp and, of course, rebuild
# one with tic.

Will do tonight.  Somehow I missed seeing a reference to "infocmp" in
the manual.

#> 14) There are a lot of grammatical errors in the manual, subject/verb
#> mis-agreements mostly.  Although minor, these errors appear there even
#> more frequently as they do in my posts.
                   ^^ than
#
# PLease let us know where you found them and we'll update them for future
# manual revisions.

I'll start a list.  Do you have a target date for the next release?

And some other items I noticed last night:

15) I installed and configured the 4.0.1 uucp package with only a few
minor problems and got it working in less than an hour.  There is some
confusion in the manual concerning crontab entries for uucp.  I think
the book says "login as uucp" when it really means "do an 'su uucp'".
Also, the crontab file being edited is root's at one point and uucp's
at another.  Also, the manual has the old "su uucp sh /usr/lib/uucp
(whatever)" when this is unnecessary with the new crond package.

16) The uuinstall package seems to work okay, but the resulting L.sys
and Permissions files had duplicated entries.  Maybe this occurred
because there were already entries for mwcbbs in both files before
uuinstall began.

17) E-mail though uucp remote sites seems to work okay, but there is a
problem with uucp file transfer.  Received files (requested by uucp
commands generated by the mwcbbs front end) came in as owned by uucp
(okay, maybe?) with weird permision bits like "rw-r-sr-s" (can't
remember exactly, but both set-id bits were on).

18) the uucheck program is acting a bit paranoid and is complaining
about the absence of about six or so files that have my serial number
as the last segment of the pathname.  Most of these were supposed to
be in the /usr/spool/uucp directory tree.  I am afraid to try the -f
option as I don't think any of these should exist.

 [The above opinions expressed are my own; not necessarily held by others.]
      == Steven J. Edwards           Bull HN Information Systems Inc. ==
      == (508) 294-3484              300 Concord Road         MS 820A ==
      == sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com     Billerica, MA 01821          USA ==
"That Government which Governs the Least, Governs Best." -- Thomas Jefferson