Re: newbie documentation (was: Re: Contributing to FreeBSD documentation (was: Re: no ath0 on new system with good card))
I have another section to add to my previous post: At some point in your dealings, you may introduce a typo into a critical startup file, such as rc.conf, loader.conf, fstab, or similar, and reach the following upon reboot: Press enter for /bin/sh: To recover: 0. press enter 1. cd /etc 2. cat fstab (if you don't know the partitions disks to mount already) 3. mount /dev/adXs1Y /usr (gives you the edit command) (find X and Y in your fstab file) 4. mount /dev/adXs1Z / (gives you write acess to /etc) (find X and Z in your fstab) 5. edit blah ( i.e. rc.conf) to fix the typo 6. init 6 This has helped keep me from reaching for the install disk more than once, and it took a long time to figure out intuitively - think it might give the newbie's a 'leg-up' Steve On 1/17/07, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 1/16/07, Giorgos Keramidas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-01-16 15:47, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, this is what I have so for. It was a bit late at night, so I appologise if my tone is a bit silly at times...where do we go from here? Steve [snip nicely written stuff about freezes during installation and first post install steps] Fantastic! This looks like something that would fit quite nicely with the section ``Installing FreeBSD Troubleshooting'', in the Handbook. Do you mind if I integrate this with the section? Does it look like the right place for you to write this stuff? Will you be able to review it and let me know if it looks ok? Sounds good to me. You can read the current Handbook section at: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-trouble.html Hmmm. Yes, I don't think the current page provides much actual help for newbies. Can we make sure to put links to all the appropriate man pages ( i.e. device.hints) in my text when we insert it? I've found the man online to be way more useful than I expected for people who are willing to read. We also could use some driver gurus to make my list of things to disable, and things to *not* disable both longer and correct - I admit I wrote that on my windows box, because my laptop bios disables the system (on purpose) when you put a non-compaq bsd-friendly network card in it. Go big brother. This is why I want to get the whole world to run *nix. /soapbox Regards, Giorgos It occurs to me that a new option on the boot menu of the .iso installer that opens a version of this page in links or equiv might be most useful for newbies (I'm at work, so I can't check if it's it being a help option there already). It might be useful to point to that doc if the .iso installer is started in safemode as well. Steve -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: newbie documentation (was: Re: Contributing to FreeBSD documentation (was: Re: no ath0 on new system with good card))
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Steve Franks wrote: I have another section to add to my previous post: At some point in your dealings, you may introduce a typo into a critical startup file, such as rc.conf, loader.conf, fstab, or similar, and reach the following upon reboot: Press enter for /bin/sh: To recover: While it's always nice when someone takes an interest in improving our documentation, what you have below is missing some key ingredients. 0. press enter 1. cd /etc 2. cat fstab (if you don't know the partitions disks to mount already) It's very possible that cat won't be in your path when you do this, so you might have to say /bin/cat. Similarly throughout the rest of your post. More importantly, it's crucial to run at least 'fsck -p' before trying to mount anything. If the only things you'll be mounting are in fstab already, that's all you have to type. If you need to mount something that isn't in fstab, you'll have to specify it by device, such as 'fsck -p /dev/ad2s1e'. If the prune isn't enough, then you will have to do 'fsck -y /dev/blah' for anything that didn't come up clean. 3. mount /dev/adXs1Y /usr (gives you the edit command) (find X and Y in your fstab file) 4. mount /dev/adXs1Z / (gives you write acess to /etc) (find X and Z in your fstab) First, if the slices you're mounting are in your fstab, you don't have to specify the device name, just 'mount /' is enough. Second, you should always mount the / partition read/write before you try to mount anything else. Assuming that all your slices came up clean after fsck, it is probably simpler to do 'mount -a' (or 'mount -a -t nonfs' if you have NFS mounts in your fstab without the noauto flag) than to type them all out by hand. 5. edit blah ( i.e. rc.conf) to fix the typo 6. init 6 You're much better off to just type 'exit' when you're done fixing stuff. That will take you out of the subshell, and back into the normal rc startup process. Hope this helps, Doug - -- This .signature sanitized for your protection -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32) iD8DBQFFtAOeyIakK9Wy8PsRAiiyAJ92/0/nYm7d952zEglKoDF0KOvcQQCfTS51 TwAQySkJy3SPd6vIZMNSXI8= =Ye1F -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Contributing to FreeBSD documentation (was: Re: no ath0 on new system with good card)
On 1/16/07, Giorgos Keramidas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-01-16 15:47, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, this is what I have so for. It was a bit late at night, so I appologise if my tone is a bit silly at times...where do we go from here? Steve [snip nicely written stuff about freezes during installation and first post install steps] Fantastic! This looks like something that would fit quite nicely with the section ``Installing FreeBSD Troubleshooting'', in the Handbook. Do you mind if I integrate this with the section? Does it look like the right place for you to write this stuff? Will you be able to review it and let me know if it looks ok? Sounds good to me. You can read the current Handbook section at: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-trouble.html Hmmm. Yes, I don't think the current page provides much actual help for newbies. Can we make sure to put links to all the appropriate man pages ( i.e. device.hints) in my text when we insert it? I've found the man online to be way more useful than I expected for people who are willing to read. We also could use some driver gurus to make my list of things to disable, and things to *not* disable both longer and correct - I admit I wrote that on my windows box, because my laptop bios disables the system (on purpose) when you put a non-compaq bsd-friendly network card in it. Go big brother. This is why I want to get the whole world to run *nix. /soapbox Regards, Giorgos It occurs to me that a new option on the boot menu of the .iso installer that opens a version of this page in links or equiv might be most useful for newbies (I'm at work, so I can't check if it's it being a help option there already). It might be useful to point to that doc if the .iso installer is started in safemode as well. Steve -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Contributing to FreeBSD documentation (was: Re: no ath0 on new system with good card)
On 1/7/07, Giorgos Keramidas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-01-07 08:54, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apologies on not hitting the list. Alyays forget to reply-all. No problem. I just didn't copy the list because I wasn't sure I should. So, I figured I'd try to fix the safe-mode end of things on my own, and I found a post several years old (looked like it even could have been yours) about safemode, which doesn't show up anywhere on the freebsd site. So I did what it said and grep'd boot/beastie.4th for safemode, which came up with this suprisingly total solution: add apic.0.disabled=1 to boot/device.hints. Not only does my system come up in regular boot mode, but, as you suspected, the pccard works too, so all appears well. Excellent news! Thanks for sharing the answer :) So my final question, what in all the land is an apic, Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. This is the part of your system which assigns priorities to interrupt lines of a device. The full details are probably too technical for some percentage of our user base, but more details can be found at the following pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Programmable_Interrupt_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_Interrupt_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8259 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_APIC_Architecture and why isn't apic or safemode mentioned in the handbook, manpages, or even on the freebsd site? IIRC it is mentioned in the Developer's Handbook, but you are right that it should be in the main Handbook too. Further, I'd like to write a handbook page on freebsd and laptops, because we're on my third one here now, and I'm starting to get the drift of what could usefully be added to the handbook, namely a thourough discussion of booting and device.hints. That would be great! If you can help writing such a section for the Handbook, a lot of users will be highly indebted to you, for sure :) I presume someone 'peer-reviews' handbook submissions for correctness and format? I recall reading somewhere about contributing, but I get the impression you are involved enough to tell me whether it's a bad idea or not. Yes, you are right. We have peer reviews. A lot of the documentation changes are filtered through the freebsd-doc mailing list, where documentation people hang out. Patches are mailed back and forth; edited; fixed for technical accuracy, syntax and grammar correctness; adapted to our writing style; expanded as necessary; and eventually committed to our documentation source code. You can definitely contribute as much as you feel, whenever you feel you have the time, and in any way you consider appropriate. We have a short article which describes how you can contribute to the FreeBSD Project, in general: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ Most of it applies directly to documentation too. Please skim through this article; it should be a good start. About your last question now... Yes, it's a good idea. Not just a good idea, though. It's an *excellent* idea. One of the chicken and egg problems documentation writing usually has to face is that: * New users don't know enough about the system, so they frequently pose good questions. These questions would result in higher quality documentation if properly channeled through experienced documentation writers, but you have to convince the new users that they can actually *help* by not knowing it all. * Once new users step over the thin line between being newcomers to the system and being experienced in some area, we have lost all the insight they can provide about how a new user thinks. As a result, it's easier to write documentation if we are targetting a very experienced, very technical audience. But, IMHO, the contributions of new users -- in the form of interesting questions -- are at least as valuable, if not more :) Regards, Giorgos So, this is what I have so for. It was a bit late at night, so I appologise if my tone is a bit silly at times...where do we go from here? Steve So, you've burned the latest FreeBSD .iso file, pop it in your drive, anticipation rising, and *freeze*!! Hopes Dreams go tricking away...what next? Well, the first thing is to realize that alot of people have worked very hard in their spare time to get things to the point where they are. Unfortunately, new hardware is always one step ahead. All FreeBSD drivers are written by the users - not the paid engineers of the hardware companies, so some delay at times is inevitable - there are many exceptions, however! Just compare the sata raid support in FreeBSD to that in Windows XP. But back to moving forward: one of those new or imcompatible pieces of hardware (in most cases) has just frozen up your fresh install - what to do? First, restart the computer, and choose 3 - safe mode from the FreeBSD logo boot-menu. If your
Contributing to FreeBSD documentation (was: Re: no ath0 on new system with good card)
On 2007-01-07 08:54, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apologies on not hitting the list. Alyays forget to reply-all. No problem. I just didn't copy the list because I wasn't sure I should. So, I figured I'd try to fix the safe-mode end of things on my own, and I found a post several years old (looked like it even could have been yours) about safemode, which doesn't show up anywhere on the freebsd site. So I did what it said and grep'd boot/beastie.4th for safemode, which came up with this suprisingly total solution: add apic.0.disabled=1 to boot/device.hints. Not only does my system come up in regular boot mode, but, as you suspected, the pccard works too, so all appears well. Excellent news! Thanks for sharing the answer :) So my final question, what in all the land is an apic, Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. This is the part of your system which assigns priorities to interrupt lines of a device. The full details are probably too technical for some percentage of our user base, but more details can be found at the following pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Programmable_Interrupt_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_Interrupt_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8259 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_APIC_Architecture and why isn't apic or safemode mentioned in the handbook, manpages, or even on the freebsd site? IIRC it is mentioned in the Developer's Handbook, but you are right that it should be in the main Handbook too. Further, I'd like to write a handbook page on freebsd and laptops, because we're on my third one here now, and I'm starting to get the drift of what could usefully be added to the handbook, namely a thourough discussion of booting and device.hints. That would be great! If you can help writing such a section for the Handbook, a lot of users will be highly indebted to you, for sure :) I presume someone 'peer-reviews' handbook submissions for correctness and format? I recall reading somewhere about contributing, but I get the impression you are involved enough to tell me whether it's a bad idea or not. Yes, you are right. We have peer reviews. A lot of the documentation changes are filtered through the freebsd-doc mailing list, where documentation people hang out. Patches are mailed back and forth; edited; fixed for technical accuracy, syntax and grammar correctness; adapted to our writing style; expanded as necessary; and eventually committed to our documentation source code. You can definitely contribute as much as you feel, whenever you feel you have the time, and in any way you consider appropriate. We have a short article which describes how you can contribute to the FreeBSD Project, in general: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ Most of it applies directly to documentation too. Please skim through this article; it should be a good start. About your last question now... Yes, it's a good idea. Not just a good idea, though. It's an *excellent* idea. One of the chicken and egg problems documentation writing usually has to face is that: * New users don't know enough about the system, so they frequently pose good questions. These questions would result in higher quality documentation if properly channeled through experienced documentation writers, but you have to convince the new users that they can actually *help* by not knowing it all. * Once new users step over the thin line between being newcomers to the system and being experienced in some area, we have lost all the insight they can provide about how a new user thinks. As a result, it's easier to write documentation if we are targetting a very experienced, very technical audience. But, IMHO, the contributions of new users -- in the form of interesting questions -- are at least as valuable, if not more :) Regards, Giorgos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: no ath0 on new system with good card
Apologies on not hitting the list. Alyays forget to reply-all. So, I figured I'd try to fix the safe-mode end of things on my own, and I found a post several years old (looked like it even could have been yours) about safemode, which doesn't show up anywhere on the freebsd site. So I did what it said and grep'd boot/beastie.4th for safemode, which came up with this suprisingly total solution: add apic.0.disabled=1 to boot/device.hints. Not only does my system come up in regular boot mode, but, as you suspected, the pccard works too, so all appears well. I'm sorry for the confusion - origonally, I was running i386/6.1 on the system which booted normially if the serial ports (sio) were disabled. Halfway thru the conversation, I realized I could upgrade to amd64/6.1, which would only boot safemode, even with sio disabled. So my final question, what in all the land is an apic, and why isn't apic or safemode mentioned in the handbook, manpages, or even on the freebsd site? Further, I'd like to write a handbook page on freebsd and laptops, because we're on my third one here now, and I'm starting to get the drift of what could usefully be added to the handbook, namely a thourough discussion of booting and device.hints. I presume someone 'peer-reviews' handbook submissions for correctness and format? I recall reading somewhere about contributing, but I get the impression you are involved enough to tell me whether it's a bad idea or not. Thanks again, Steve On 1/6/07, Giorgos Keramidas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please don't top post :( It would also be nice if you copied the mailing list to any replies, but I don't know if I should copy this reply to the list too, so I am sending it privately. On 2007-01-06 19:49, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 1/6/07, Giorgos Keramidas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-01-06 10:08, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have an ath0 card working fine in one system. I put it in the other, kldload if_ath, but no ath0. kldload appears sucessful, because if you try it again, if says file already present. I notice my pcmcia appears to show up sucesfully when I boot, but I get no output on tty0 when I plug in the ath card, like you do on the other system. Are the two systems the same FreeBSD version? If not, can you show us dmesg output from the two systems, and then pciconf -lv output after the card has been plugged in? dmesg gives the following interesting info: cbb0: PCI-CardBus bridge pccard0: 16 bit.. on cbb cbb: Unable to map IRQ... device_attatch: cbb0 attatch returned 12 nothing seems amiss in pciconf -lv (no net on that system - broadcom :( , although I don't see entries I'd expect for the cbb0... Note, I neglected to mention I the computer won't start unless it's in safe mode, otherwise, it freezes after the line module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (amr_linux, 0x806205d0, 0) error 6. The line before that is Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec, and the line after (in safe-mode) is ad0: 57231MB The amr(4) driver is the driver for MegaRAID SCSI/ATA/SATA RAID controllers. Can you try disabling this controller and see if the kernel boots normally in normal mode? I still don't know about thee following: - Are the two computers the same? (The one where the PC-CARD works, and the one where it doesn't) - What FreeBSD version is this? In safe mode ACPI is disabled, and this may be why your cbb0 PCI-CardBus bridge fails to work properly. -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: no ath0 on new system with good card
On 2007-01-06 10:08, Steve Franks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have an ath0 card working fine in one system. I put it in the other, kldload if_ath, but no ath0. kldload appears sucessful, because if you try it again, if says file already present. I notice my pcmcia appears to show up sucesfully when I boot, but I get no output on tty0 when I plug in the ath card, like you do on the other system. Are the two systems the same FreeBSD version? If not, can you show us dmesg output from the two systems, and then pciconf -lv output after the card has been plugged in? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
