[ANNOUNCE] DragonFly BSD Installer RC1

[Chris Pressey]

Thanks, everyone, for the reports!  The installer has now reached RC1
(plus a few bugfixes) and many of the issues mentioned have been
addressed.  As before, an ISO image can be downloaded from:

  http://www.livebsd.com/dfly/

Two of the issues deserve further explanation:

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 01:57:38 +0200
Ivan Voras <ivoras at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> - During bootup, there are several messages about looking for pfi.conf
> on various partitions (nonexistant...) and mount_msdos not finding
> them

This is actually a feature.  The idea is, if you insert a floppy or
attach a pen drive while booting the CD, that (msdos-formatted) media
can contain a configuration file which, if found, will tell the CD how
to boot (how to configure network interfaces, which installer frontend
to start, etc.)  The main benefit of this is that it allows for a
headless install over the network (rather than over a serial line.)

An example configuration file can be found here:

http://freebsd0.sitetronics.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/tissue/scripts/conf/pfi.conf.sample

> I tried the install on a blank VMware disk, and when I tried to 'use 
> only part of disk', I couldn't - the installer asked me to "Select 
> primary partition" (what is this? there are only two options - type
> 165 and 'Go Back'), and then an error was reported : 'executing
> disklabel -B -r -w ad0s4 - device not configured' or such. Since this
> is a blank disk, there is certainly no ad0s4.

This is actually a problem with fdisk.  To see the problem, pick a disk
you don't use (I'll use ad3 as an example) and try:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad3 bs=32k
  fdisk /dev/ad3

fdisk will generate an error (but it will still yield a zero exit code.)
It will also tell you (bogusly) that the first three partitions are
unused, and the fourth is a sysid 165.  Hopefully when Eirik's disk
library is stable we'll be able to use it to fix both the installer and
fdisk in this regard.

Thanks again!

-Chris