On Sat 20 Dec 1997, Julian Coleman wrote:
> First, apologies if this message is a little long.

Just a nit; maybe you should have provided the INSTALL-doc on request. I'm
glad you took the effort though ;-)

> Anyway,  I've got a few observations/questions on the installation.  After
> the floppies have been read, there is an error :
> 
> 	init: /etc/spwd.db: No such file or directory
> 
> I didn't think this mattered much, but later on, when /dev/MAKEDEV is run,
> there are errors of the form :
> 
> 	chown: bin: illegal user name

These should be fixed in the 1.3 release. I was having some trouble fitting
all into 1Mb. The first bug should be fixed by using a '-DSMALL' version
of init(1). The second by no longer removing the '*pwd.db' files to make
room for some temp-files.

> and all the devices in /dev ended up owned by uid 0.  I  ran 'MAKEDEV all'
> later to fix things up.
> 
> In edlabal, the modify subcommands are :
> 
> 	a-q : modify partition
> 	q   : quit this subcommand
> 
> Shouldn't that be 'a-p' ?

Yup. This is a bug. I fixed it on the trunk. It is unlikely that this
will make it to the 1.3 branch.

> With 1.3, the swap devices have to be specified in /etc/fstab, but these
> don't get added by default.

It looks like this is fixed in the meantime too - in install.sh. 

> If you don't configure the network, no system name gets set.  I just
> configured hostname and domain name, the hosts table was :
> 
> 	cat: /tmp/hosts: No such file or directory

Seems like an initialisation problem. I haven't had time to investigate this
though.

> If you extract from tape, the instructions say use the 'no rewind'
> device, but after extracting each set, the tape is rewound and then
> fsf'd to the correct file.  Most infuriating!  Tape install seemed
> faster than (a TOS partition on the same) disk, apart from this bit.

I never tried this. It was a 'feature' already present when I adopted the
miniroot install for the atari. I usually use ftp or gemdos-partition.

> Is it worth me looking at the install scripts?  Or are you planning
> to move to 'sysinst' at some  point?

At some point, yes. I'm wondering though if the 1Mb limit isn't going
to be a show stopper. An alternative is dropping support for 4Mb machines...
Also moving to another installation procedure is not on top of my todo-list ;-)

[ I think the rest has already been answered  ]

Leo.