Hello all,

although I`ve been amongst the users of RiscBSD since the first Alpha2-Release,
this is my first public apearance on the mailing list.

FYI, we (ExGRA) are Official Acorn Dealers for Saarland and Westpfalz (two
regions in Germany), and as selling Acorn machines still is a matter of 
enthusiasm rather than profit here, (in fact, we're selling ten times more PCs
just to be able to survive), one of the features offered to our Risc PC 
customers is the installation of RiscBSD for free (just as a service, no
direct commercial interest apart from selling one or two machines/year more
to people with a vital interest in Unix, see below.)

First of all, I have to thank everyone contributing to the development
of RiscBSD over the last months (years now, in fact) for the very good
work they've done. I've been reinstalling RiscBSD some five or six times
completely from scratch up to now, and I`ve always been pleased to have
noticable improvements over the previous versions. 

The reason for this mail is that we've been presenting the StrongARM Risc PC
on the local computers show `HobbyCom Saar' two weeks ago.
Therefore I tried to reinstall the latest distribution of RiscBSD from scratch
again, unfortunately I experienced exactly the same difficulties with the 
Root Disc as mentioned by several people already, and finaly had to stick 
with showing the boot up sequence for RiscBSD and giving the promise that I had
several stable versions up and running on the machine for months. In fact,
several customers had seen it one year ago, as we've been at the same
show already, at that time presenting the first RiscBSD Beta (IIRC).

Two days after the show the new Root Disc together with a huge number of new
sets, including the whole X-distrib, appeared on the main ftp-server, but since
data transfer from non-german domains has gotten _awfully_ slow recently
(~2 Byte/sec at daytime), I had to spend several nights to get those files
and have them installed, though not without problems again.

Since I couldn't find all those problems mentioned on the mailing list, I 
assume there aren't too many RiscBSD users with StrongARM yet.
Therefore, here a short description of my experiences, apologies if the 
are caused by my own stupidity:

- couldn't use !gzip to unzip the Kernel, used !SparkFS instead, as mentioned
  in another mail already.
- flopwrite doesn't seem to work in connection with the StrongARM, 
  flopwrite -t=1440 inst-12/fs results in an Abort on Data transfer.
  I can look up the exact message, should there be need.
  Fortunately we still have several non-StrongARM-Risc PCs, so writing the
  Root Disc on one of them worked.
- the latest StrongARM-Kernel (SA110-4713) doesn't work, it crashes
  just after recognizing the Cumana Interface with the message
    panic: sfasintr: ILLEGAL COMMAND!
    stopped at 0x0118284: ldmdb r11,{r11, r13, r15}
  Hope this is of any help, changing back to SA110-4702 worked first time.
- X still doesn't work for me, after setting the relevant paths and
  changeing the access rights for /dev/vidc??? (correct filename forgotten, 
  sorry) and /dev/quadmouse, using startx just gives the NetBSD intro-screen,
  a short glimpse of the standard background and then a shut down to the
  command line with the message
    Returning from InitInput()
  again. This has been checked with fwvm, twm and without any Window manager
  at all, always the same result. In fact, fvwm additionally crashed with a
  'Data abort: Permission error (page)' and produced a core dump.
  Remember, I got all the sets present on ftp.ph.kcl.ac.uk at October 30th.

Apart from X RiscBSD seems to work stable now, as far as I could see.
This has been important, since one of our new customers is an Internet Provider
who has been very impressed by the speed of the StrongARM RiscPC and is 
planing to use one under RiscBSD as their main server, as soon as the
driver for either the Cumana SCSI-II or the Connect 32 cards has reached
a decent speed and additionaly the data base system Postgres95 can be compiled
(see my followup-email according the latter, if interested).
I hope this is good news and won't cause too much trouble ;-)
As I've got close to zero knowledge with networking RiscBSD, every help with
that would be welcome, especially I`d appreciate to know which Ethernet-card
would be the best choice for that task.

As a result of the nights-worked-through for the reasons already mentioned,
I decided to donate a 1.2GB SCSI-Disc to our local university asking them
if it was possible to establish a mirror for ftp.ph.kcl.ac.uk /pub/acorn.
I got their ok since my previous request had been denied due to too few
hard disc space; with the donation this is no problem any longer (though
it's ridiculous for an university to complain about disc space concerning
the low prices for harddiscs nowadays, IMHO).
Therefore, Mark, if you're willing to have another mirror in Germany
(Stuttgart seems to be updated not very often anyway), it'd be somewhere
on ftp.rz.uni-sb.de or ftp.cs.uni-sb.de. I'd feel honoured to do the
administrative work for that.

Finally, here are the specifications of our RiscBSD-System, maybe they're
helpful for tracing the bugs:

- RiscPC 600, upgraded with SA110/200MHz and Acorn 16Bit Sound upgrade
- 32MB DRAM
- 2MB VRAM
- Quantum Fireball 1280A at the internal IDE-controller, currently
  499MB allocated to RiscOS 3.7, ~780MB to RiscBSD
- Goldstar ATAPI-CDROM, 8x Speed
- Cumana Fast SCSI-II controller, Driver Version 2.03 for Strong ARM,
  latest Flash-EEPROM-Kit from their ftp-server
- Quantum Atlas 4.3GB Ultra Wide SCSI, currently unused by RiscBSD
- Samsung SyncMaster 20GLs, configured to 1280x1024x256@70Hz for RiscBSD,
  using a monitor definition file created by MakemModes both for RiscOS and
  RiscBSD

My apologies if this mail has gotten far too long.

With best regards,

Stefan Schlesinger
ExGRA GbR, Saarbruecken, Germany



-- 
          Stefan Schlesinger           ! "Mr. Gates, we would like you to
          ExGRA Saarbruecken           !  leave the building." Acorn Ltd.,
Registered Acorn Developer (800 936)   !  Cambridge, mid-80s. One of the 
e-mail: stscl@cscip.uni-sb.de          !  wisest decisions on the planet.