Hi!

A couple of comments on the kind of critical analysis that I guess most of us
would make after 2 unproductive days. They come from a UNIX 'near-virgin' who
only last week amazed himself by getting RiscBSD up and running:

[snip]

>I tried to use my Acorn SCSI card with my HP C3325A SCSI drive.
>This drive was formatted 400 MB to RISC OS.
>
>I am very persistant, and I this refuse to install it to an IDE drive
>first as I did the first time I installed RiscBSD. As a matter of 
>fact, I do not even have a suitable IDE drive for RiscBSD. The
>210 MB I have is my boot disc, and too small for RiscBSD anyway.

But you could put a boot partition on it, and put most other RiscBSD stuff on
the SCSI drive? Surely the nature of beta releases is that we may have to
compromise a little on our ideal solutions, in order to get things running?

[snip]

>But, now another problem turned out. It seems that the filecore
>partition has been formatted with 64 sectors/track and
>8 tracks/cylinder, but the disc is physically 127/9.

>Unfortunately, bb_riscbsd is using the logical data that filecore
>reports, and RiscBSD itself is using the physical.

>How can I possibly find a number of cylinders that gives the
>same number of blocks for these two different ways of splitting
>the cylinders in the area between 400 and 500 MB?

The fundamental problem seems to be the use of a SCSI drive to boot RiscBSD.
If this is the case, it needs addressing, but in the final analysis hardly
justifies the opening paragraphs of the original posting.

[snip]

>14) Add information about unixfs in the install-guide, 

IMHO, given the low cost of CD ROM drives, CD ROM should be the standard
distribution medium for anyone without very fast ftp access. Hence, I agree
with 14). Indeed, because my CD ROM drive needs a soft-loader under Risc OS, I
didn't worry about using an ATAPI kernel, and didn't try a 'proper' CD-based
installation, but with a bit of help from Chris Walker, I used the CD ROM with
UnixFS exclusively once the first bit of the installation had been done with a
single floppy, particularly for copying the sets into the RiscBSD partition.
This is quite painless, and could well be documented - together with the chmod
commands required to give write access to the distribution directory!

[snip]

>2) My HP drive is larger than 2GB, how will that work with RiscBSD
>on a RISC OS 3.6 computer? What about 4GB drives?

I'm using a 1.6Gb drive with 3.6 - no problems. Why should 2Gb or 4Gb be
significant under 3.6?


Clearly, Thomas had a major problem with a SCSI-based installation. But I
don't think that in the cool light of day it justifies his rather protracted
critique of the priorities of the RiscBSD project. The fact that he hit a bug
- possibly a significant bug - doesn't necessarily outweigh the fact that
installation, while it could be better documented and should encourage and
explain the use of a CD and UnixFS, can be achieved on fairly 'standard' Risc
PC systems by someone who had never ever used a Unix system in his life
before.               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I hope that would-be users of RiscBSD who are wondering about taking the
plunge will not be put off by Thomas' problems. With a more basic
configuration, and using an IDE drive, there is no need for there to be any
insurmountable problems, especially if a CD ROM drive allows you NOT to have
to use a pile of floppies. My success no more makes the installation process
perfect anymore than Thomas' difficulties means that RiscBSD is in crisis! 

Sorry for the rather polemic rather than technical nature of this posting, but
I wouldn't want potential users to be put off by Thomas' saga. Nor would I
want the RiscBSD team to get a persecution complex!

Cheers.
-- 
*** Stuart Bell (sabell@argonet.co.uk)        Running Risc OS and ***
***      RiscBSD on an Acorn Risc PC in a Wintel-free environment ***