Stuart Halliday wrote:

> So has anyone yet managed to get RiscBSD installed on a removable 1Gb JAZ
> SCSI drive using a Alsystems SCSI II card? I've tried numerous times and
> given up on it.
> 
> Using the version of RiscBSD supplied on the Developers CD, with the
> upgrade patches from the RiscBSD web site.
> 
> Is it my imagination or is RiscBSD very buggy when it comes to supporting
> common interface cards and devices?

It's not buggy, it's just more of an aquired skill :-)

> It appears to me that not enough attention is being given to making the
> thing easy to install in the first place.

The problem is as follows: Acorn World CD ROM. Producing the image,
fixing install bugs, doing multiple test installs, compiling the whole
darned lot fixing the odd binary problem or two, and finally writing the
CDs, took about 2.5 weeks of Mark's time. During this period, Mark was
payed salary. The revenue of the CD ROMs as a whole was only just enough
to even cover salary during this period (let alone the opportunity cost
of having to put three other contracts on hold...). Let alone the stand
cost at the show, everyone elses time involved, documentation, packaging
up and posting and printing recepits and labels, etc...

So, please think hard about these things. We try as hard as we can; if
you like, we can happily do an ARMLinux-style "dump the whole lot on a
RiscOS CD ROM inside an X-File", save time, drop the cost, and spend 3
times as long answering problematic e-mail messages afterwards. Users
can then have to put up with extracting and moving files around, making
root discs, etc, but to be honest, we'd sooner have a much fluid
installation system---which for the most part we've got, apart from the
odd problem with certain bits of hardware. From the last CD ROM, we've
seen roughly a mid-90% problem-free installation rate.

The release for the Developers CD ROM was done with two days notice, at
the last minute, with no profit for anyone involved (apart from Acorn,
probably) so what do you expect, especially as this was the first
release where we made kernels with built-in root filesystems (to make
the installation easier).

Sorry if I've gone on a bit too much here :-)

	N.