On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, grant beattie wrote:

> > 4) fdisk allows you to set active, but never shows it. (No indicator if
> > active or not.)
>
> It shows in reverse video for me - is that not what you are seeing?

It said the "highlighted part is the one you are editing".

I should read better. Thanks. The highlighted part is the active
partition.

I guess it would be nice to also have a simple asterisk by it or say
"active" by it also.

(On a side note: does active mean same as other fdisk's "bootable"? And it
looks like I can only have one active, but other fdisks allow multiple
"boot" partitions.)

> > 5) The boot selector, should use partition ID names as the default boot
> > selector labels.
>
> I think I have this in my local tree, but it has problems when there
> are two partitions of the same type - should be simple enough to fix.

Okay.

> > 7) There was no way to exit fdisk to go back (for example to tell it to
> > use whole disk). CTRL-C works then type "./sysinst".
>
> That is annoying, yes...

It is the weakness of the whole menuc/curses design I guess.

> > 8) disklabel properly told me that "Standard w/ X" was too big and dumped
> > me into custom mode. It defaulted to disklabel partition that extended
> > outside of my fdisk partitions and over fdisk partitions for different OS.
> > This was user error -- I should have seen this. But I was going quick and
> > assumed that it was just using the amount of space available. (This may
> > have caused above #6 boot issue.)
>
> How much ram did you have in this system? Standard and Standard w/X
> are somewhat dubious, and want to allocate 2 x ram for swap (I was
> told that my 1gig "test" partition wasn't big enough, because the box
> had 512mb ram, grr).

I think it was 64 MB. When it reverted to custom it had three partitions:

a for NetBSD
b for swap
c for whole disk

I removed "b" because I was going to add it later (due to it being a
shared swap with Linux on extended partition). I should have paid
attention that it made a 500MB disklabel partition even though the
beginning of that disk was only a 143 MB NetBSD ID and next 143 MB was a
Linux partition.

User error? Or a big message telling sysinst user to really double-check
the numbers when there are other DOS partitions. (Or maybe there was.)

> > 9) It asks about normal versus serial bootblocks. But sysinst never tells
> > the user what that means. (sysinst is usually good at briefly explaining
> > strengths and weaknesses of other tasks though.)
>
> Easily fixed. :)

Thanks.

> > 10) When it showed the time (in the timezone setup), the screen flickered
> > a lot. Maybe it should only refresh time every two or five seconds or so.
> > Or maybe don't rewrite so much of the display each time.
>
> Or maybe it doesn't matter at all, just display the current time and
> be done with it .. I hate this part, too :)

That should be fine unless someone leaves and comes back later. "Come to
dinner ...."

Maybe don't show seconds and update once per minute.

> > 11) When sysinst is "now complete", you press enter. But then you are back
> > at "Welcome to sysinst". This is confusing. It should have option to
> > "reboot". (Because exit gives a shell prompt and a person installing could
> > be really lost.)
> >
> > Should I send-pr any or all?
>
> Yes, please send-pr this - I can certainly do something about some of
> these fairly soon. Thanks for noting this stuff down :)

Done. PR install/18192: various sysinst issues

I took six pages of hand-written notes. (I am slowly finishing up a
"Getting Started with NetBSD book", so I want to go over everything pretty
well.)

Thanks!

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/