[nycbug-talk] DragonFlyBSD adventures

[Scott Robbins]

I haven't seen too much about DFBSD on this list, so thought I'd share
my experiences--not sure how common my problems are.
First the disclaimer--I have just been playing with it, and when I ran
into a problem, did a fairly cursory search of their bugs mailing list.
So, it is quite possibe that sometimes I missed the obvious.  

First problem was booting the CD.  If you get the big_timeout error,
that keeps repeating, this can be due to the CD being a master.  In my
case, I switched the cables so that the CD was a slave, and it booted
without problem.

During the default install--and DO NOT use 1.0, use 1.0A if you have
anything else on the drive--there was a problem with 1.0, where it was
messing up anything after its own partition--it gives what seems a
reasonable size for /usr and defaults to using the rest of it for /home.
In my case, on a 7 gig partition, I found that I was better off not
creating a separate /home partition.  Various builds go on in there, and
as it divided /usr into about 3 gigs and /home into 2, I ran out of room
at one point.  I've found it easiest, at least on a 7 gig partition, to
change the defaults to use remaining space for /usr and create a dcvs
directory in /usr/home.  

Funny mistake--at one point, mistyped and made a /home directory--that
is, on the 140 meg or so / partition.  Oops--that messed up the first
cvs rather badly as it quickly ran out of room.

I follow the README and just go with the supfile defaults for the first
cvsup--when I thought I was being clever, and put it directly into /usr,
I had trouble with cvs checkout--no doubt this could be solved with a
quick google, but at this point, I'm just playing.

Another funny mistake--assuming you're following the README and have
cvsup'd then do cvs checkout src---DO follow the README and be sure you
have first done the cd /usr.  If err, uh, you're in, say,
/usr/local/etc, editing a config file and forget to cd to /usr you'll
find all your src stuff is in, for example, /usr/local/etc/ssmtp.  Oops.  

Other small glitches--things that run from /usr/local/etc/rc.d, e.g.
samba.sh are looking at /usr/local/etc/rc.subr. (This is in the sh
script itself).  At least as of 4 days ago, that was giving me trouble
and editing the script to look at /etc/rc.subr fixed the problem.

The cups.sh has a case statement that has

*BSD) 
which should work. However, (again, as of a few days ago) uname didn't
have BSD as part of it, just DragonFly, so the case statement didn't
work.  It went to the last choice, *) which was looking for a file that
wasn't on my system.  Easily fixed by slightly editing the case
statement so that rather than *BSD it just read DragonFly.

There are a ton of packages on go.bsd.org that can be added with pkg_add
-r.  A few aren't working perfectly, but most do.  

There are, so far, only a relatively few specific DragonFly
ports--mostly, they're using FreeBSD 4.x ports.  However, there can be
problems, for example, at least as of a week ago, xorg wouldn't build.

Aside from these minor problems, it seems like a nice OS though, and
should become quite good.  I suspect that many of my issues could be
solved with a little research, but at this point, I'm simply dabbling.

Anyway, hope this is of use to someone.

-- 

Scott

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