izumi@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) (04/19/91)
Has *anyone* received the 2.1 update set floppies? (Not 2.1 on Optical or on NeXTstation scsi disks). Please post here if you got them. I believe I ordered the update about a month ago, but haven't got it yet. I am wondering if NeXT is shipping them at all to anyone. If nobody is getting them, I can think of two reasons that could be preventing the shipment. [1] NeXT goofed again in securing the supply of ED (2.8MB) floppies. (Not again.) [2] NeXT is having trouble making the update software work. It seems to me that, in order to update the system binaries on the internal SCSI disk, the machine must boot from something else, either from floppy, net, or OD. Replacing sdmach, shared library, and possibly other things in /usr/lib, /usr/etc of a file system in use will surely crash the machine, as I have verified by trying to copy 2.1 system binaries on top of 2.0 files. If booted from floppy, it can't possibly use the nice NextStep apps, let alone the Installer. So, are they trying to put some small stand-alone installer for system binary update purposes? That could be a hairy job to do. I understand the reason why NeXT essentially dropped the OD as the bundled device, but it seems that they now have a tremendous problem of updating system binaries on all those hard disks of currently shipping machines. Despite bad publicity of the OD, it was/is a nice backup and alternate boot device. It made the NeXT machines the only workstation class machine with plug and play system software upgrades. Now, it's like any others. How are they going to do it? Meanwhile, NeXT, please tell someone with 2.1 and FTP access (unofficially) that you don't mind 2.1 update placed on FTP archives. Izumi Ohzawa [ $@Bg_78^=;(J ] USMail: University of California, 360 Minor Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 Telephone: (415) 642-6440 Fax: (415) 642-3323 Internet: izumi@violet.berkeley.edu NeXTmail: izumi@pinoko.berkeley.edu