Test it while it's hot

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... my alma mater: UNIX

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Thank you, Peter and all other developers for all your very hard work

I'm going to DL and install, and feed back here

Bye

I downloaded and did a fresh install on my sstem, all went fine, I wanted to put the nvidia drivers on for my video card, and using package manager I did the initial portsnap and located the driver and used a package to compile.

Approx 1/2 through the compile the system just rebooted...

I was able at that point to get back in and figured I just got a system glitch. So I went to terminal and su then issued:
cd /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver/&& make install clean

Where I got a stop error, I can't tell you what for cause it crashed before I had a good look.

System reboots and gets the the fsck checks and says it must be done manually error in /usr and drops me to single user mode.

I run fsck and it went crazy with reconect this stop that, and now after reboot file system error.

I'm pretty sure the hard disk is fine, it's a fairly new Seagate 80gig, 40 partitioned with suse10.2 running fine and the remainiing for desktopbsd. I'll run some checks on it later today to verify for sure, but it's just kinda strange to me it crashed like this installing the nvidia driver.

the nvidia driver's been crazy since they split into the legacy driver and the current driver, I'd say download it from nvidia.com and manually build it, making sure to set the X11 base. Also make sure you've got the dependencies installed... start by reading this:

http://desktopbsd.net/forums/viewtopic. ... 1&start=30

Myself or Oliver will probably get around to updating the wiki page

did an update and so far have the following feedback/queries:

1) The resolution issue from RC1 is handled a lot better, but is there some way we could do it even better? Perhaps booting into a known safe mode - 640 * 480 @60Hz and having a graphical wizard attempt probing, basic setup etc and maybe offering (as an advanced user capability) some way of entering in monitor settings or a known good xorg.conf? Maybe xorg 7.2 will negate the effort...

2) Could the HDA audio drivers be patched in? Or will it wait until they're moved from CURRENT to RELENG? See this thread:
http://desktopbsd.net/forums/viewtopic. ... hlight=hda

3) Can there be a bit more detail on existing Slices/Partitions in the drive selection of the installer wizard? When you've got four identical discs it's a little concerning... I could be overwriting my pr0.. ummm, masters thesis... yeah



I shut down, unplugged the extra drives, ensured I had the correct drive still plugged in, did the upgrade and now I have the other drives plugged back in.

4) After the file copying is complete, is it possible to just have DBSD dismount the drive and eject the disc?

5) Can the splash.pcx be updated to line it up with the rest of the boot process as per here (post 2):
http://desktopbsd.net/forums/viewtopic. ... splash+pcx

Apart from that, the only thing that's bugging me is that the initial run of portsnap is taking a while - some kind of percentage feedback during the 'fetch extract' would be nice - there's a lot of data for us to pull over to NZ (international traffic for us is typically shaped a lot harder than domestic traffic) And the ability to set the timezone as part of the installer would save a few headaches too. See: http://desktopbsd.net/forums/viewtopic. ... t=timezone

/update: portsnap just took two and a half hours to do the initial download

>Could the HDA audio drivers be patched in? Or will it wait until they're moved from CURRENT to RELENG?

I'm using them with a nforce 430 board, without any problems. But I could never compile it myself, don't know why. But copying is okay.

Furthermore it would be nice to see OpenBSDs nfe in DesktopBSD.

http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shigea ... d-nfe.html

It's a real stable opensource driver instead of this wrapper for Linux nve. Installation is by the way rather easy.

_________________
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DesktopBSD Developer Blog
DesktopBSD wiki

With two monitors (Philips 19" crt and Hyundai 17" tft) attached at a Nvidia Geforce 6600 it's impossible to see anything, it's out of sync. I cannot use the TFT to install at all, I have to disconnect him and use the Philips instead. I do know this isn't a problem of DesktopBSD, it's a problem with the two well-known FreeBSD live systems too. With Knoppix e.g. it's no problem and of course I can use both of them with Nvidia blog and TwinView or nv and Xinerama.

_________________
... my alma mater: UNIX

DesktopBSD Developer Blog
DesktopBSD wiki

I was wondering, if it will be possible to upgrade from RC2 to final version when the final version comes out? Since i want to switch to RC2, since i've got major update problems in v1.0

Yes, updating should not be a problem, but be warned that RC2 is not a finished product so back up your data first. Beyond that, RC2 is a usable product and should update nicely to 1.6 FINAL

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DesktopBSD WIKI - FreeBSD Handbook

What are checksums for the ISO files?

Thanks,
Andrew

Peter

wow, this thread has a lot of views.

Ok, I have more:

When doing an upgrade, could it be possible to export a list of currently installed applications (to say, a usb stick, or the userhome) - perhaps this could be done in the live environment, perhaps it could be a tool in the package manager - exporting to a simple text file eg


and you can throw in your options, as in the win32-codecs example, and have it work like an answer file of sorts.

The point being that I installed RC2 last night, after waiting two and a half hours for portsnap to sort itself out I went to bed, and woke up this morning to find that the package manager had not got far, stopped and was awaiting my instructions. If I know what I want, or if the package manager can figure out what I want from my pre-upgrade configuration, then that would save me a lot of time.

So I got up this morning, instructed the package manager on what I wanted and went to work. I arrived home 8 hours later to see the package manager was patiently awaiting more instruction...

As it stands, I'm still compiling from last night and still havent got around to the nvidia driver - so I'm just thinking of ways that this process could be streamlined and a bit more user-friendly.

Another one: What about pre-downloading files to /usr/ports/distfiles as well? If the package manager detects an idle state such as awaiting user feedback, give it a long time out like 10-30 minutes, assume the user is away and get it downloading other files from the pending operations list, so that come compile time for those - the files are there and ready to go

Yeah, these ideas do have flaws...

One little aesthetic one for the package manager though, when a pending operation completes successfully - change the icon in the pending operations pane to the green tick, if it fails in some way, change the icon to the exclamation mark warning symbol - this way if there's a big list of pending operations, the user can know what they can use while the other operations are going... Being able to listen to music through amarok while an office suite compiles is a lot better than twiddling your thumbs for hours wondering if amarok is installed... or worse - playing track by track via kaboodle

Just a couple of thoughts, I'll probably have more brain droppings as time goes on

Hi whetu,


Copy the contents of /var/db/ports on your old system to the same directory on your new system and you will have all your configured options back. If you prefer not to use any custom options at all, add BATCH=yes to your custom make environment (Preferences > Advanced). Everything will be compiled with default options then.


This is a very good idea and I would really like to see that, but this should be addressed in portupgrade and not the package manager. There is also the problem that you can't tell beforehand whether you can use a binary package for a dependency or have to build from source and therefore need its source files.


I really like that idea and will look into it.

Peter

Okay, I successfully replicated this issue and I've yet to figure out if it's in the nvidia-driver itself or in one of the dependencies like compat5. I have to recover my system first, which I'm itching to do but...

I'm currently at work , but if anyone would like to try, give the following a shot:
cd /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver-9631/&& make install clean

This will (at least try to) install the older 9631 driver version, which shouldn't be a problem unless you're running the latest and greatest 8800gtsxp.org.net extreme edition sli woodchipper card

checking out http://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver/ gives this, though:
08 Feb 2007 16:49:13
1.0.9746 danfe - Add a patch by Christian Zander from nVidia that fixes crashes reported by
users on recent 6.X and -CURRENT systems. This applies to both versions,
9631 and 9746
- Optimize REINPLACE_CMD invocation while here

EDIT: Continue discussion about this here: http://desktopbsd.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=6873#6873

another Mirror

ftp://segglsranch.org/pub/RC2

Happy downloading.