[1238] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
several problems with NetBSD 1.3/Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (peeto de la noche)
Wed Apr 29 12:34:23 1998
From: peeto de la noche <gamache@MIT.EDU>
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
Cc: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 12:34:11 EDT
1. by far the most annoying bug of all: i believe there is a problem with
your floppy images of some sort. they grab hold of the BIOS ok, and
begin the sequence of looking for a kernel ('netbsd', then 'netbsd.gz',
etc.) it finds netbsd.gz fine, and then starts to boot from it. it shows
the numbers (which are meaningless to me, but seem to indicate happy things
are going on), or rather the first two of them, and the little spinner
spins away, and then it prints 'exec: short read' and goes on the next
kernel ('netbsd.old' or something).
this happens not every single time, but enough to be seriously annoying.
in my experience the NetBSD 1.3 boot disk does this about 70% of the time,
and the NetSBD 1.3.1 boot disk has done this every single time, although
i have a friend who has gotten it to work. i used the regular command
for copying the images:
# dd if=floppy.fs of=/dev/fd0a bs=18k
and i've even tried block size of 512 bytes, and it doesn't seem to help.
2. there is no 'adduser' command for the superuser to add people to
/etc/master.passwd file. or if there is, it's not in the PATH
env variable.
3. i've mentioned this previously, but there's no straightforward way to
change the root password ('/os/usr/bin/passwd -l root' is the only way)
and people don't know of this way very often.
other than that, NetBSD 1.3.1/Athena is working great. thanks.
-peeto
