Kim Øyhus and I have spent of lot of time today installing RiscBSD
1.2-release on his RiscPC 700. We installed it to his default IDE
drive (Conner 850MB), and ran into problems very quickly.

The problem was that egrep and gunzip did not work, and he was unable
to install the base set.

This problem was also reported by Duncan Ferguson on the 24th
(reached the list at the 25th just past midnight), and
Mark P Hoyle sendt out a workaround the same night (reached
the list at 4 am on the 25th).

(I saw that email, and assumed that it had been fixed by the time
we started or that we could just patch the install script.
Obviously I was wrong.)

Since Kim had deleted his old RiscBSD installation and we live some
distance apart, we had to find some other way to fix this.

The solution was to use a UNIX computer on the Internet that we
both are users on. I ftp'ed egrep and gunzip to this computer
and kim picked them up from there.
With these two programs in place he was able to install the base
set, and then all the other sets.

He is now very happy about this, and everything seems to work fine.


After this I started to investigate what the problem was.

I saw that all programs in /usr/bin was just a link to /bin/cat,
including gunzip. There was no sign of egrep.
Also, when I ran gunzip there was no action whatsoever. This
indicated that something is wrong.

I then booted with the 1.2-beta/inst-12.fs.gz floppy and checked
the gunzip there. That was ok. Also, I checked the inst script
on that floppy and found that egrep was not used.

So, then I booted again with 1.2-release/inst-12.fs, mounted
the 1.2-beta/inst-12.fs floppy, and copied the /mnt/bin/cat program
to /bin/cat. That made gunzip work, and the /mnt/usr/local/sbin/inst
script was able to install the base set.


So, the conclusion is: Use the 1.2-beta/inst-12.fs.gz file to
install the 1.2-release until someone (Mark?) fixes the floppy
for the 1.2-release.

The 1.2-release/upgr-12.fs does not seem to have this problem,
but that also is missing the egrep program.


I ask myself how this could have happened, and I can only think
of one reason. The person (Mark?) who made the 1.2-release
installation floppy has not done a new installation with this.

I also do not think that it is wise to call such a "all commands
in one program"-program for /bin/cat. It should have been called
/bin/all_commands or something else so that one does not conclude
like Kim: "All programs is /usr is only cat, no wonder that it
does not work." I also had the same conclusion until I saw that
the 1.2-beta/inst-12.fs.gz floppy had the same. Then I did a
compare of the two cat's and found that they were different.
That was what triggered me to try the cat on the 1.2-beta floppy.


There has just been too many problems like this, so I think
we need to establish some better testing procedures before
releasing software. Too many man-hours are wasted trying to
fix problems that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

I was going to finish the installation manual today based on the
1.2-release, but I have been bogged down by this problem and wasted
several hours.

This probably means that I won't be able to finish the manual
until the CD-ROM has been released.

I am very sorry about that, but my time is very limited as I
have a lot of work to do at work before I go to England next
week.

But, I may be able to finish the manual after all. Only time
will tell.

Kjetil B.