rose@galtee.cs.wisc.edu (Martin Luther King) (04/17/91)
Coherent Digest Vol. 91.2, No. 4 Tue Apr 16 14:07:26 CDT 1991
Today's Topics:
CoMB
MWC Distributes PD Software
Moving Coherent partitions
Gatewaying Proposal
Beta sites
Bootable Coherent Floppy Tech Note
Administrivia:
The Coherent Digest is a forum for discussion of the MWC Coherent 3.x
operating system. Send submissions to "coherent@cs.wisc.edu" and
administrivia to "coherent-reqeust@cs.wisc.edu". Previous issues are
archived for anonymous FTP access on piggy.ucsb.edu in the directory
"pub/coherent/mail-list".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 12 Apr 91 14:30:01 EDT
From: Stephane Doucet <73207.1247@CompuServe.COM>
To: <coherent>
Subject: CoMB
Hi all,
OK, I fixed the garbaged screen with CoMB...the TERM setting was
wrong on my profile. Now that the TERM types match on both ends the
screen is rid of garbage but I still can't read the mail. Pressing
<ENTER> doesn't do anything. Typing 'M' for mail asks me for a
destination but hangs...I can type a name but can't delete any characters
hitting <ENTER> doesn't go anywhere and neither ctrl-C or D...I had to
break the connection. Sounds like the <ENTER> key is not working while
I use CoMB. Any ideas?
- -Stephane
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 91 15:20:55 CDT
From: Scott Rose <rose>
To: coherent
Subject: MWC Distributes PD Software
I got an offer in the mail yesterday from MWC-- I suppose that everybody else
that is registered got it as well-- consisting of 6MB of PD software on four
HD diskettes for $35. It includes the infamous CoMB that has been giving
everybody's favorite poster such headaches of late, plus Clam and a bunch of
other stuff that is also available on Piggy. Notable omissions are RCS and
my port of less. They are also offering $10 off the driver kit, but you must
buy the PD software to get that. I guess the only reason I have for posting
this is for the benefit of people who never registered, either because they
stole Coherent or because they... well, just never registered. It seems like
a reasonable deal for somebody who doesn't have FTP access or who wants to
avoid some headaches-- presumably everything you need is either in the vanilla
3.1 distribution or on the diskette set.
It sure has been a long time since we have heard anything from MWC on this
list... I don't think they have Usenet access because they subscribed to the
newsgroup digest that I publish. The closest thing to an estimate of the
number of registered owners appeared in the marketing blurb for the new
product-- they say that "tens of thousands" have bought Coherent 3.x. Every
10,000 buyers would mean $1M in revenue for them at $100/crack, eh? I like
to think that this means that Coherent has been a success in the marketplace.
In case anybody should care, the three list services now have the following
subscriber counts:
Echo list 148
List digest 27
News digest 13
This is not exactly what I would have expected-- I had thought that the
number of echo subscribers would drop by about 75% from a high of about 200,
and I would have expected most of the remaining subscribers to the echo and
the list digest to have picked up the news digest.
-S
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 91 1:54:01 PDT
From: Hamid Misnan <hamid@uop.uop.edu>
To: coherent
Subject: Moving Coherent partitions
Hi,
I'm going to put my Coherent to my new 40M HD (Segate 157A) and
I want to know if there any difficulties on installing Coherent
on it. Right now I've Coherent partitions on my WD Caviar 80M
IDE HD. What I want to do right now is to delete Coherent
partitions on my 80M HD. I have heard that it is difficult to
delete Coherent partitions (and it happened to me too last time
when I want change to a new 80M HD.. at last I reformated it using
WD special formater and I know it dangerous to do that!).
Any help is really appreciated... Thanks in advance.
-mid-
- --
*-------------------------*----------------------------------------*
| Mohd H Misnan | INET: hmisnan@madvax.uop.edu |
| Univ. of The Pacific | hamid@uop.edu |
| Stockton, CA 95204 | an605@po.cwru.edu |
| U.S.A | UUCP: uunet!uop!mhm!hamid |
*-------------------------*----------------------------------------*
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 91 18:22:09 CDT
From: Scott Rose <rose>
To: coherent
Subject: Gatewaying Proposal
This is just in from the Coherent Listserv service (which I address as
"Coherent@IndyVax.IUPUI.EDU") administrator. Basically, he proposes that
all the traffic to Comp.Os.Coherent and Coherent@IndyVax be gatewayed
to my echo service, and that all our traffic be gatewayed to both of the
other services. I would continue to publish a digest, but only a single
version-- one which would contain all the traffic originating on all three
services. I don't pretend to understand the details of how loops are
prevented, but the technology to do this is apparently solid.
I'm inclined to enthusiasm for the proposal, with some discomfort at not having
seen it work yet. In conjunction with my digest service, a good job of serving
all classes of users is done. I've included his proposal in this message, and
am looking for prompt response from anybody that has objections-- particularly
those European and Compuserve subscribers who, not having free or near-free
network access, may have valid concerns about this scheme that have not
occurred to me.
I must apologize for proposing yet another reconfiguration of the service,
just a couple of weeks after the last one. Believe it or not, one of my goals
is to keep administrivia to a minimum...
-Scott
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Date: Sun, 14 Apr 91 12:35:00 -0500
Reply-To: Coherent operating system list <COHERENT%INDYCMS.bitnet@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
Sender: Coherent operating system list <COHERENT%INDYCMS.bitnet@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
From: John B Harlan <IJBH200%INDYVAX.bitnet@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
Subject: Instruction texts
To: Multiple recipients of list COHERENT <COHERENT@INDYCMS>
As co-owner/co-coordinator of the ListServ list, Coherent on ListServ@
IndyCMS / IndyCMS.IUPUI.Edu, I'd be delighted to make available via the
Coherent Filelist any downloading and installation instructions for various
ported public domain software that anyone wants to make available. As a
relative Coherent/UNIX novice myself, instructions that tell (a) where the
specific package is available (i.e., mwcbbs, piggy, etc) and in what
directory, (b) how it can be gotten (uucp, ftp, bitftp, etc), (c) step-by-
step instructions of what directory to download them to and incredibly
explicit step-by-step instructions on how to install them :-) , and (d)
an explicit listing of permission, owner and group settings and necessary
links -- this would be tremendously helpful to those of us who are learning
UNIX from the ground up via Coherent.
Please contact me directly at the e-mail address below if you would
be interested in contributing or using such instructions, made available
by public GET COHERENT instruction_filename command from ListServ@IndyCMS /
IndyCMS.IUPUI.Edu.
By the way, does anyone on any of the three lists -- comp.os.coherent,
Coherent@CS.Wisc.Edu or Coherent on ListServ@IndyCMS -- have any objection
to a tri- or bi-directional gateway between these three lists? As envisioned,
this would result in a posting to any one of the three automatically being
redistributed to subscribers of the other two. This would effectively
create one united Coherent discussion with three access points -- Usenet,
Internet mail and ListServ -- thus eliminating the need for multiple
subscriptions and hopefully resulting in some modest conservation of network
bandwidth. Subscribers who wanted to receive just a digest could still
subscribe to Scott Rose's digest, which presumably would include the one,
unified set of traffic. The proposed gateway site, IntelliGenetics, has
extensive experience in successfully gatewaying such discussion lists
without significant difficulties. I have been personally involved in one
such gateway, and can attest to the absence of looping and any other such
glitches. The gateway, if implemented, would be virtually transparent to
Coherent discussion participants. If anyone has any questions about such
an arrangement, please e-mail me privately at the address below, and I'll
summarize to the lists. Thanks.
+ +
John B Harlan
125 West Marion Street 529 IJBH200@IndyVAX CREN
South Bend Indiana 46601 1096 IJBH200@IndyVAX.IUPUI.Edu Internet
U S A IVAX::IJBH200 IU Network
+ +
- ------- End of Forwarded Message
------------------------------
Date: 15 Apr 91 17:51:47
From: jay@mwc.com (Jay Alter)
To: cohmail.norm@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Beta sites
A third party software developer is interested in some beta test sites
for their Bourne Shell based accounting system. If anyone is interested
in beta testing this package please contact me.
I will pass the names of the people who contact me onto the developer.
They only need a few additional people. If the level of interest is high,
they will have to decide who to use. In addition to your address and phone
number, please include a short statement about why you feel that you'd
be a good beta test site.
My e-mail address is jay@mwc.com. Thank you very much.
Jay Alter
Director of Marketing, Mark Williams Company
Jay Alter <<<<If was a developer I'd move to Tahiti
jay@mwc.com with a 386 based notebook PC, some disks,
uunet!mwc.com!jay and a good beach chair>>>>
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 91 12:08 EDT
From: pete@whutt.att.com
To: coherent
Subject: Bootable Coherent Floppy Tech Note
The following may be useful to Coherent users; please include it in
your excellent digest if appropriate. Peter Fillingham att!whutt!pete
x........................... CUT HERE ....................................x
Subject: bootable writeable floppy
The COHERENT Operating System Release Notes (Release 3.1.0)
along with the main manual suggest ways of creating a bootable
floppy. One difficulty of this procedure is that, after
producing a bootable floppy, one can't write to it !
The following shell programs are suggested as a way making a
bootable floppy, and below is the fix recommended by mwc
for making the bootable floppy system read-write.
(0) first boot your system from your hard disk, login in as root,
use mkdir to make a convenient subdirectory [e.g., /bin/temp ].
cd to /bin/temp. Place disk #1 of your mwc original floppies in
drive A:, then enter
dd if=/dev/fha0 of=cohboot count=80 bs=30b
Run it in the background if you wish [follow the above line with
an &; use ps -axfl if you are curious]. This will take just over
three minutes depending on the speed of your system. What is
going on is that dd is creating an image of your boot floppy in
you default directory with the file name cohboot. N.B. the image
requires just over 1.2MB of file space.
(1) Next run the following shell program:
echo "/etc/fdformat -v /dev/fha0"
/etc/fdformat -v /dev/fha0
echo "/etc/badscan -o proto /dev/fha0 2400"
/etc/badscan -o proto /dev/fha0 2400
Run it in the background if you wish; it takes time.
The echo lines simply display each command line just before it is
carried out to tell you what is going on. The second and fourth
lines format the floppy and check for bad blocks, respectively.
In addition, a file (proto) is being built in your default
subdirectory. This file will contain a list of the bad blocks:
look for a line with %b in it. Probably it is best to use only
a floppy wiht NO badblocks: so try until you find one.
(2) make sure you have a subdirectory /f0 on your hard disk;
if not, use mkdir /f0.
(3) Next run the following shell program:
echo "/etc/mkfs /dev/fha0 proto"
/etc/mkfs /dev/fha0 proto
echo "cp /conf/boot.fha /dev/fha0"
cp /conf/boot.fha /dev/fha0
echo "dd if=cohboot of=/dev/fha0 count=80 bs=30b"
dd if=cohboot of=/dev/fha0 count=80 bs=30b
echo "/etc/mount /dev/fha0 /f0"
/etc/mount /dev/fha0 /f0
echo "cd /f0 "
cd /f0
echo " DONE but f0 still mounted !"
The second line makes the file system on the floppy using the
information from file proto. The fourth line copies boot.fha
to the floppy. The sixth line transfers the image of your
system boot floppy to your newly formattted disk (note all
these things take time). Finally, the floppy is mounted so that
while you have booted from the hard disk and have root permissions
you can write to the floppy. The last line simply rings the bell
and tells you it is done.
(4) next (noting that your default directory is /f0, i.e. the
floppy disk) enter:
mv begin autoboot
then enter
db coherent
then enter
ronflag
the response is
ronflag=001
then enter
.=0
then a response appears
ronflag=000
then enter
:q
and you should get back your prompt.
(5) Finally while the floppy is still mounted, cp over your most useful
programs to the appropriate directories (e.g., vi or me, du, df,scat...)
Lastly umount f0, shutdown, sync and boot your writable floppy.
VERY carefully rm the files you won't [can't] use. Note that it will
be possible to mount your HD coherent partition from your booted
floppy ! Note also that you now have a VERY SMALL coherent OS.
Caveats: For some reason the boot floppy doesn't like pipes. Why ?...
The above procedure works for me; i'm sure there are better ways,
simpler ways; if so please let me know. AS mwc occasionally says,
CAVEAT UTILITOR.
Peter Fillingham att!whutt!pete
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End of Coherent Digest Vol. 91.2, No. 4
***************************************
--
Scott Rose
rose@cs.wisc.edu
(608) 238-3801