FC 2: thank you!

[Dialup Jon Norstog]

To the list:

I would like to thank everyone who was involved in putting together the FC2
distro for Alpha machines.  The way you were writing about it I expected kind
of a hack job, but it is excellent.

I especially like the Firefox browser and AbiWord, and the new screen savers.
 I can now work over WordPerfect files (ten years' worth!) on my Alpha without
having to change over to NT.  Actually, I tried FC2 on a PC first, liked it
and decided to put it on my Alpha.

The install went pretty smoothly on an XP1000, but only after some frustrating
moments. The installer will tell you you need a BSD disklabel, then give you
the option to continue.  Cool! it's gonna fix my disklabels! Of course, it
doesn't, and a perfectly good installation is unbootable.  (I booted it to
check, by pointing to the FC2 installation from the aboot.conf file in my 7.2
installation)

The Compaq "Jumpstart" CD from the 7.1 box set fixed everything.  It allowed
me to BSD-label, initialize and format a hard drive ready for a perfect install.

I had no such luck on a PWS500.  The install hangs within the first few
packages.  This is a machine with a good SCSI CDrom drive and DEC memory, one
that in the past had similar install problems that were cured by a change to a
SCSI CDrom drive.

So far everything seems pretty stable, and what isn't maybe will get better
with a recompile.  Also, my guess is that with the AMD64 machines spreading
around, official source code will be a lot more 64-bit friendly.

Thanks again

jn



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