Hello!

In message <Pine.OSF.3.91.961024231952.28866A-100000@platon>
          Mark P Hoyle <markho@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk> wrote:

> > I tried using inst-12/fs as the rootdisk image and i got as far as
> > trying to install the base set when i kept getting an error 'egrep 
> > not found'.
> 
> I also had this problem. I ended up copying egrep and gunzip from my old 
> installation of RiscBSD (from another drive) so that inst would work 
> correctly.

On an Acorn meeting last Saturday, I installed 1.2-R from scratch on somebody's
machine. Btw, he already has his StrongARM and everything worked fine with it.
We didn't figure out why his Cumana SCSI II is not found though ("podule0: not
configured", although the manufacturer string seemed OK). We upgraded to
firmware v2.03 before.

To say it short, the 1.2-R installation disk has more traps in it than any
installation before. :-(((

First, egrep's not there, second you need gunzip because the large /bin/cat
binary copied over from the install disk won't unpack anything when called as
gunzip for unknown reasons.
There is no /dev/MAKEDEV (only MAKEDEV.local) in the etc set!!!
You're lost at this point if you're installing for the first time and don't
have a good portion of Unix experience. :-(((
Fortunatedly, my machine was sitting next to the one to be installed on, so we
could just copy over the missing parts.

There is also a problem with set filenames written in capital, they're not
listed by inst if you "Show distribution sets" or "Show installed sets"
although they're there in both cases and you can install them.
IIRC, this also leads to problems if one set depends on another.

Furthermore, the /tmp directory doesn't have the correct permission so users
can't start vi at first. This has been present in the alpha2, was fixed in
between AFAIK and is now back. :-((( Probably a NetBSD problem.

It's a rather minor snag by then that the permissions for Xarm-21 don't have
the sticky bit set and that it belongs to bin:bin instead of root:wheel and
that fvwm is looking for its stuff in /usr/lib/X11 instead of /usr/X11/lib/X11.
Fvwm crashed most of the time, especially when started by xinit, but I don't
know why.
Btw, the xinitrc hasn't been present in all versions of X, thanks for putting
in it.

The user account creation in rcm doesn't copy the dotfiles from /usr/share/skel
to the user's home directory.
These have to be fiddled with anyway, but I ask myself why they still set the
path to /usr/new and /usr/old. I haven't seen these on any NetBSD system yet.
/usr/local also doesn't make much sense in the path.
This also seems to be a NetBSD problem.

The last problem was that the user we created was not allowed to su to root
although he is in wheel. I checked this with id.

So new install and upgrade disks are definitely needed. Anybody who wants to
install 1.2-R should wait for them.
I will check out how I can help to imrove things.
I want to investigate the problems with the dotfiles, the /tmp permissions and
the path.
I also want to see if I can improve the user creation skript.

So long, Markus