On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 12:10:22PM +0200, fabio.f@gmx.de wrote:
> Hello everybody,

Evening!

> 7 months ago I read in the Internet that Debain-Linux is a half FreeBSD. So
> I bought it, but after now 6 months I get highly frustated with FreeBSD, so
> I'm searching for an alternative. I will choose between NetBSD or Debian. So
> first I have some questions:

Well I think you should choose NetBSD :)

> I have an ESS 1869 ISA PnP Sound card. In FreeBSD no one could say me how to
> configure it, because the kernel device pcm & sbc for an ISA PnP (ESS)
> doesn't work and the option PNPBIOS could not be found in my computer. But Windows
> and Freebsd dmesg| grep pcm say that an ISA PnP sound card was found. But sh
> MAKEDEV snd in FreeBSD failed and the /dev/dsp was not created. So I have no
> sound. And Debian sais that in Linux you have to recompile the kernel too
> and run the sound driver OSS and the tool isapnp. Why BSD-Unix doesn't need a
> sound driver and isapnp tool like linux. Your NetBSD-guide sais teh ESS 1869
> is a PCI sound card. Are You sure, is it really easy to configure it with only
> the four PNP options in the kernel configuration? The second problem in

Do you know if it is actually an ISA or a PCI card? I suspect it's probably
ISA since that's what my ESS1868 is. NetBSD supports the ESS1868 out of the
box:

isapnp0: read port 0x203
isapnp0: <ESS ES1868 Plug and Play AudioD, ESS0000, , > port 0x800/8 not configu
red
ess0 at isapnp0 port 0x220/16,0x388/4,0x300/2 irq 5 drq 1,0
ess0:: ESS Technology ES1868 [version 0x688b]
ess0: audio1 interrupting at irq 5
audio0 at ess0: half duplex, mmap, independent
opl0 at ess0: model OPL3
midi1 at opl0: ESS Yamaha OPL3

So your card will probably work too.
NetBSD doesn't use /dev/dsp (unless you're using linux emulation), instead
we have /dev/audio0 and /dev/sound0 for the first sound card.

> FreeBSD was, that i know with pkg_info|less i know what I have installed and with
> pkg_info 'prgname' I get a little info about the Application. But how do I
> know their starting command?

NetBSD has the pkg_info|less and pkg_info 'prgname' functionality as well.
You can't tell what the starting command is from the package output.
One thing you can try is to do

pkg_info -f 'pkgname'|grep bin

Which will give you a list of binaries installed by this package, this will
give you a clue what to do next.

> A GDI Printer was in Linux and Unix a problem, but now Debian have a link to
> an Homepage, where a lxm3200-0.4.1-gs5.50-bin.tar.gz file for a windows
> Lexmark 3200 printer is there for download. This must be compiled in gs 5.5. But
> this is for Linux. Can I use this under NetBSD too?

Many people use the NetBSD package 'magicfilter', which links
lpd and ghostscript together in an easy way. I can't see a filter explicitly
for a Lexmark printer, but one of the other filters might work instead?
Failing that, the lxm3200-0.4.1-gs5.50-bin.tar.gz file can probably be
incorporated into NetBSD's ghostscript package.

 - Chris

--
strawberry@toth.org.uk
http://www.toth.org.uk/~strawberry