On 1/8/1997 at 11:45 PM, Barclay Hershey <bhh3@cornell.edu> wrote:

> [...] the emulator isn't bug free yet.  It'll allow you to get things up
> and running, but I would be wary of core dumps and seg faults on certain
> commands that make calls which haven't been implemented in the emulator.

Heh. Almost everything generates segfaults on my Q610/68LC040. I've never
actually managed to create a regular user account for myself, because vipw
segfaults and generally crashes consistently whenever I try to save the
password file. I also get segfaults lots of other places, and randomly.
Things seem to fail at random.

I've gotten up to GENERIC(SBC?)-15 with little change. I'm using a Quantum
disk, and it's about ready for a reformat and reinstall as a result of all
the errors. fsck doesn't seem to run reliably due to the general
instability of the system. At times it gets the segfaults along with
everything else.

There have been some errors that seem totally random and arbitrary. For
example, about half the time gcc chokes on a "Hello, world" compile. The
other half of the time it compiles properly, with the same source. I'm
guessing this is related to the 68LC040 problem, although I don't
understand why the problem is random. I'd think I'd either segfault
consistently or succeed consistently with this sort of problem.

One last amusing thing... When I try to edit something with vi, and I try
to save, I get errors of some sort. (I forget what, and I'm sure that
doesn't help, but if it's important, I'll record the errors. With all the
other problems, this error might depend on some of the known problems.)
After quitting out of vi, the directory I'm in fails to register when I ls.
I see nothing. The files are still there, because I can still cat things
and stuff, but ls sees nothing. Also, as I remember, pwd gives me an error
as well at that point.

All of this aside, I'm still eagerly looking forward to running a stable
NetBSD on my system, and I'm still waiting with bated breath for someone to
announce that they've come up with a completely stable kernel for me. :)

Once I have a stable system, I want to *try* to get LocalTalk support
going, so that my (then) NetBSD box can act as a mail and news server
(among other things) for my in-home LocalTalk net.

Later...

--
            Mason Loring Bliss   /\   Abhorr=E8d Styx, the flood of deadly
mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us  /()\  hate, Sad Acheron, of sorrow black
    http://www.four.net/~mason /    \ and deep. --Milton