From news.csusb.edu!csus.edu!decwrl!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!pavo.csi.cam.ac.uk!iwj10 Wed Mar 9 14:14:09 1994 Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce,comp.os.linux.help,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news.csusb.edu!csus.edu!decwrl!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!pavo.csi.cam.ac.uk!iwj10 From: ijackson@nyx.cs.du.edu (Ian Jackson) Subject: Changes to Linux Frequently Asked Questions with Answers Message-ID: Followup-To: poster Summary: For those who have already read the FAQ and want to know what's new. Originator: iwj10@bootes.cus.cam.ac.uk Keywords: FAQ, Linux, changes, diff Supersedes: Sender: iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson) Nntp-Posting-Host: bootes.cus.cam.ac.uk Organization: Linux Unlimited Date: Wed, 9 Mar 1994 00:07:57 GMT Approved: *.answers moderation team , Matt Welsh Expires: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 00:07:57 GMT Lines: 81 Xref: news.csusb.edu comp.os.linux.announce:21 comp.os.linux.help:1099 comp.answers:107 news.answers:152 Archive-Name: linux/faq/diff Last-Modified: 09 Mar 1994 This document gives an English description of what changed in the most recent FAQ. Comments on and submissions for the FAQ are strongly encouraged and welcomed - I don't have time to *read* every article in col.help, and thus need your assistance to spot the FAQ-threads that I miss. Changes February - March 1994. Structure: Q7.13. mtools cannot initialize ... moved into right section. Modified questions (changes to content): Q2.4. Where ... by FTP ? Added sunacm.swan.ac.uk, clarified. Q3.5. ... BSD FFS, SysV UFS, ... Info on alpha Amiga fs. Q3.6. Can I run MS Windows programs ? Can do real-mode Win 3.0 under dosemu. Q4.5. How do I remove LILO ... ? Incantation can preserve partn table. Q5.1. What is ld.so and where ... Version number increased to 1.4. Q5.6. What does gcc -O6 do ? Mentioned future compilers. Q5.7. Where are ... Say to rm -rf before linking. Q6.11. My machine runs very slowly ... I&GS guide says how to make swapfile. Q6.15. My keyboard goes all funny ... Fixed in new kernels. Q6.16. My screen ... weird characters Correct it with ESC c instead of ^O. Q6.23. How do I remap my keyboard ... kbd now up to 0.84 for kernel 0.99.15. Changes January - February 1994. Structure: * Document split into two parts, just before section 6 (Miscellaneous) * "X Windows" changed to "The X Window System" in section heading, but left as it is elsewhere. New questions: Q3.4. Can I access OS/2 HPFS partitions from Linux ? Q5.9. My ext2fs partitions are checked each time I reboot. Q5.10. I have a huge /proc/kcore ! Can I delete it ? Q6.1. How many people use Linux ? Q6.2. How can I get scrollback on text VC's ? Q6.13. How can I produce core files ? Q6.15. My keyboard goes all funny after I switch VC's. Q6.24. I've discovered a huge security hole in rm ! Q7.1. lp1 on fire Q7.10. EXT2-fs: warning: maximal count reached Q8.4. mtools says cannot initialise drive XYZ Q10.4. Disclaimer and Copyright No longer Public Domain. Modified questions (changes to content): Q1.2. What software does it support ? SLIP & PPP mentioned Q2.1. Where can I get the HOWTOs ? FTP-by-mail addresses updated. Q2.5. I don't have FTP access. FTP-by-mail addresses updated. Q3.5. Can I access [XY] filesystems ? HPFS removed, UFS added. Q3.6. ... OS/2's Boot Manager ? Said to activate bootmgr partition. Q5.5. GCC ... thrashes Updated because GCC 2.5 now exists. Q6.5. What is a BogoMip ? Info from BogoMips Info Sheet. Q6.9. ... very slowly ... GCC / X / Added `cat /proc/meminfo' Q6.14. How do I stop ... core files ? This is the default for new kernels. Q6.19. How do I upgrade my kernel ? Makefile has zlilo target. Q7.5. make says Error 139 Also: no swap, disk, 387 trouble. Q7.9. ... mounting unchecked fs Expanded considerably. Q8.1. Does Linux support X Windows ? Slightly expanded. Q9.1. You still haven't answered ... Mentioned mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu. Modified questions (typographical corrections): Q1.3. Does it run on my computer ? MCA paragraph grammar fixed. Q3.1. Can Linux coexist with DOS ... Stray pasted text removed. Q4.4. ... more than 16Mb of swap ? Anachronisms & typos removed. Q4.7. ... Stacker ... for Linux ? Alain Knaff's email address fixed. All question numbers should refer to the numbering in the new edition in each case (eg, for the January to February changes the numbers refer to the February 1994 edition). -- Ian Jackson, at home or PGP2 public key available on server. Urgent email: 2 Lexington Close, Cambridge, CB4 3LS, England; phone: +44 223 64238 From rmallory@blaze.csci.csusb.edu Wed Oct 26 20:04 PDT 1994 Received: from blaze.csci.csusb.edu by silicon.csci.csusb.edu (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA06940; Wed, 26 Oct 94 20:04:40 PDT Received: by blaze.csci.csusb.edu (AIX 3.2/UCB 5.64/4.03) id AA12288; Wed, 26 Oct 1994 20:00:39 -0700 Received: from freefall.cdrom.com by silicon.csci.csusb.edu (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA00464; Tue, 25 Oct 94 07:30:19 PDT Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.8/8.6.6) id HAA17406 for announce-outgoing; Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:00:26 -0700 Received: from violet.berkeley.edu (violet.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.155.22]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.8/8.6.6) with ESMTP id HAA17400 for ; Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:00:23 -0700 Received: by violet.berkeley.edu (8.6.8/1.33r) id HAA24977; Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:00:23 -0700 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:00:23 -0700 From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Message-Id: <199410251400.HAA24977@violet.berkeley.edu> Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce Subject: FreeBSD 2.0 - a status report. Followup-To: poster Organization: University of California, Berkeley Keywords: freebsd release status Apparently-To: announce@FreeBSD.org Sender: rmallory@blaze.csci.csusb.edu Precedence: bulk Content-Type: text Content-Length: 6028 Status: R Given the number of questions I've seen recently in some of the newsgroups and in private email, I decided that a status report was probably well overdue. My apologies for being so absent as of late, but life has been rather... Busy... [you may consider that my official submission for "Understatement of the year"]. In a nutshell, the next release of FreeBSD will be version 2.0, based fully on CSRG's 4.4 Lite release. The fact that this is a ".0 release" translates to (if you follow industry trends at all) "New, interesting, sort of usable, buggy in the extreme." If you're a fearless OSNaut, then FreeBSD 2.0 should be your oyster. If you actually want your system to work reliably without much intervention on your part, then I'd be more inclined to suggest that you stick with FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 (or even 1.1) until FreeBSD 2.1 comes out. Now that I've scared all of you off, I should hasten to add that my personal system runs FreeBSD 2.0, has run FreeBSD 2.0 for quite some time, and hasn't hurt me yet. I've had to fiddle with it, of course, but that's sort of to be expected of a system that's run FreeBSD 2.0 from pre-pre-pre-pre ALPHA all the way up to the present. For those who have the next obvious question on their tongues, it's a Pentium P5-90 PCI with a Buslogic Bt946c controller, an SMC Elite Ultra ethernet card and a #9 GXE64pro 4MB graphics card. The X server is from X-Inside, Inc. Until I felt a need to ensure that the Buslogic controller support was kosher, I was also running an NCR 53C810 PCI SCSI controller with equal success. Quite a few others are running 2.0 with equal success, so the picture isn't quite so bleak as I like to paint it - I just want to make sure that people who count on us for stability know exactly what the worst-case scenario is. A lot of people have come to rely very heavily on FreeBSD over the last 18 months and I'd much rather see such people run something that works for them than see them suffer on the bleeding edge with the rest of us. All that preamble aside, here are some hard facts: The release engineer for the 2.0 release series (ALPHA, BETA and RELEASE) is Poul-Henning Kamp. He's phk@FreeBSD.org, and should be consulted in matters of release scheduling and 11th hour feature requests. The ALPHA release of FreeBSD 2.0 has already been released internally, and we hope to do a public ALPHA release sometime this week if all goes well. If this is late, don't don't yell at me though, yell at Poul-Henning. It's his call (I think, somehow, that he's going to get me for this). The BETA release has not yet been firmly scheduled, but I know that the plan loosely calls for BETA and FINAL to follow the public ALPHA by no more than a few weeks. I sincerely hope to see something in November, and will make a lot of noise if this looks like it's getting pushed out any further. We've always liked to release our stuff on a fairly regular basis, and 2.0 is hardly an exception. The 2.0 FINAL release will be made available on CDROM from Walnut Creek CDROM, and the sharp-eyed have probably already noticed it in their catalog. Walnut Creek CDROM is very committed to FreeBSD, and hopes to release quarterly updates as FreeBSD 2.x moves into a more regular release cycle. More details will be announced when the CD goes to final pressing. 2.0 will support all PC peripherals supported by 1.1.5.1, plus a few extras. I'm not being coy, but I will refrain from commenting on the extra hardware support until closer to release time. There are a few things lurking in the wings that may or may not make it in, so it's too early to comment. Early iBCS2 support will, indeed, be provided in FreeBSD 2.0 and a number of SCO binaries are currently running with it. We're not quite up to running Word Perfect for SCO yet, but it's been reported that some popular SCO commercial database systems are running now. This is an evolving feature, and I have every expectation of being up to "Word Perfect level" sometime fairly soon. Many thanks to Soren Schmidt (sos@FreeBSD.org) and Sean Eric Fagan (sef@FreeBSD.org) for their efforts here. Next stop - Linux binary emulation! Support for dynamic loading of kernel features (Loadable Kernel Modules) has made great strides forward in 2.0, and almost all existing 4.4 filesystems can be loaded into a kernel at runtime. The same can be done with SCO binary emulation, and several other features. This makes kernel configuration much more flexible, and you can expect that we'll be making even more aggressive use of LKMs in future releases. In response to significant "customer feedback" from 1.1.5, the installation process has been seriously revamped, and we hope to provide a much more user-friendly installation mechanism for 2.0. Only time and ALPHA will tell, however, so I'll say no more about this and let you folks do the talking when the time comes. The FreeBSD ports collection has been started over from scratch using a new ports distribution mechanism. It's my hope that this mechanism will allow us to provide even more ports, and at substantially lower storage costs for their users. See the current sources for more details. As always, the FreeBSD Team works hard to be responsive to your requests and feedback, and can be reached at . Current snapshots of our 2.0 work-in-progress are also fully available to the public, and can be obtained through `sup', CTM (patches-through-email) or anonymous ftp from ftp.FreeBSD.org:~ftp/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/{src,ports} Information on sup may be ontained from freebsd.cdrom.com:~ftp/pub/sup. Information on CTM is available from ref.tfs.com:~ftp/pub/CTM I'd like to also thank all those who have helped us bring FreeBSD 2.0 as far as it's come (we're all still rather astounded, actually) and those who have been so patient in waiting for it. Your words of support and encouragement have been, as always, very much appreciated! Thank you! Jordan Hubbard For the FreeBSD project team.