On Tue, 26 Dec 1995, David Mazieres wrote:

> It sounds like just a little detail, but just about every single PC
> I've run accross that was bought before 1995 had an Adaptek 1542
> controller.  Partial 1542 support is a real turn-off.

I've always thought it was a bit odd that someone who could go and
put a thousand dollars worth of RAM in their machine couldn't afford
another two hundred for a new PCI motherboard and NCR controller.
But that's just me. :-)

> Well, I myself have been seriously, seriously tempted to switch to
> FreeBSD.  The prospect of 32Megs of RAM and a working mmap...

What's not working in 1.1's mmap? I've got INN running under 1.1 using
mmap for both the active file and dbz, and I'd like to know what's about
to go wrong. (Currently the active file on disk doesn't update, but I
think I just need to put an msync() in ICDwriteactive().)

> Note, however, that the FreeBSD install procedure really frustrated
> me.  It's beautifully colorful, but very ambiguous and wouldn't give
> me a root shell.

I have to agree with this. I couldn't get a root shell either, nor
could I find any way to get FreeBSD to put a disklabel on a disk
without putting a DOS partition table on it. Many of my NetBSD
installs these days involve doing `disklabel -R' with a label I
already have.

On the other hand, I was impressed by the ability to automatically
ftp everything necessary. The install looks great for beginners.

> ...and then last summer there were rumors that
> Linus himself was doing an alpha port.  [These could quite well be
> true, its just that the last time I looked at Linux source code there
> was a lot of PC-specific stuff (the VM code looked a lot like a 386,
> for instance).]

I gather that Linux/Alpha is doing fine, but it's a completely separate
source tree. It's going to be fun integrating that one!

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.