=== Beginner's Area: questions and answers on getting started ===
* Warren Toomey
This must be a FAQ but I haven't found the answer yet. Once we have logged in, how can we mount a DOS floppy on /mnt? I've run fd & and dos -d //disk/fd:fd0 -n /mnt -B 64, and I see a message about FAT12, but I can't find the mounted directory. I've also tried -n fs/mnt with no luck. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
And if there's a way of similarly mounting an CD9660 CD on an ATAPI drive, I'd appreciate that too! Thanks.
* Erik Dalén
-n fs/mnt means that there will be an entry in the namer for the dos filesystem. you will then need to use 'mount //fs/mnt /mnt' to get it into that process namespace. So just by starting the fileserver for the filesystem you won't get an entry for it in the namespace, you'll need to bind it there with mount.
* Warren Toomey
Help! I've set up a box with VSTa on it and an NE2000 clone. I've compiled
KA9Q, it runs fine. From the net> prompt I can attach ne, ip address and ping/telnet correctly. However, when I put the attach and ip address commands into config.net and run ./net config.net, the pings fail. How do I correctly configure KA9Q from a config file? And are there any on-line docs on how to set up a Telnet server? Thanks in advance.
* Andy Valencia
Hmmm, don't know about the config file; sounds like you're doing the right thing. You should use the ip addr command and what not without any
argument, and see if the config commands made it into the running program. You may need to run under gdb to see what it's doing with the
config file.
As for telnet daemon, that's down in ka9q/cmd, and once you compile it and have ka9q running, you should be able to run it. Note that you have to run it
as "root" (or with root capability available) in order for it to forge the identity of the user logging in.
* Andy Valencia
The mgr 0.69 port was pretty close to operational when I last fiddled with it.
It would paint the screen, select() across the devices, see the mouse click,
and put up the starting screen. There was some hair with select() and TTY
devices under each window. I can make it available to somebody who is willing
to run with it.
* James Haggerty
Realised that my question about mgr wasn't answered. To repeat: is the mgr 0.69 port you mentioned on the mailing list some time ago going to see the light anytime soon (the current mgr always seg faults on exit for me, and does other nasty things)?
Oh, and with the 1980 files, those with the system attribute (or sys+hidden, perhaps) and the fake directories (like /env and /namer) have no dates... and I think my volume label used to be an undated file as well.
* Erik Dalén
* But you only need it as an attribute, not a permission. And shells can instead assume everything in $PATH or as the first argument are executables.
* Andy Valencia
* Yes, you really need it. Shells, for instance, won't play without it.
* Erik Dalén
Is the execute permission really needed at all? It's enough to have read ability to execute a file anyway. So it's really just a file type attribute and doesn't need to be encoded several times for a file (ie for a file with id 1.6.2 the x permission appears three times) (I think it should be handled just like all other filetypes)
* Andy Valencia
* I'll look at the Makefile thingie; could've sworn that worked.
* I don't agree that there are always 1980's files around, but nobody pays attention to the message anyway so it should probably go!
* One time I overloaded one of the "other" DOS filesystem bits (for symlink experimentation) and it sucked, as it inevitably collides with other apps. Never again.
* James Haggerty
Thanks for the quick response... I've inserted a few italicised comments in your post.
* Andy Valencia
a. Yes, time stamping is pretty tedious/hairy in CVS. I didn't remember it being as bad as all that, though!
a. VSTa is mostly just inheriting the madness of the world of terminal emulation. That said, I think the Esc-[ sequence should be the standard.
a. It's a losing proposition to encode terminal geometry in a termcap entry. The actual termcap API query should get whatever the driver at the moment thinks. MGR supports this, for instance.
a. gmake tries both makefile and Makefile, right? ''Nup. Just makefile; doesn't pick up Makefile at all.''
a. Case sensitivity shows some residual cruft from before I added full vfat filenames to the DOS filesystem. I should just nuke that stuff now.
a. I'll look at uname
a. Tilde emulation should be considered experimental. But it really shouldn't be a shell feature, since then every bloody program has to code up tilde support too. It probably just needs to be pounded upon.
a. Copying files to the root of a DOS tree should work. I'll double check.
a. I believe the DOS server only complains once about files whose timestamps it can't represent in VSTa time_t format. ''And since these are always around, is there any point in complaining about it?''
a. The fact that the DOS filesystem itself doesn't have execute attributes falls out in lots of strange ways. I guess one could try to heuristically calculate an execute permission... hadn't thought of that. Usually you include it in your filesystem design. :) ''Or perhaps you could use the archive, hidden or system bit to do it (since VSTa doesn't use them)? Can tar store these? Maybe I should just try and use vstafs. FAT is fairly annoying: I just checked actual space used by the clusters (16k) vs. space needed, and it was 150mb vs. 45mb. Ouch.''
a. The most common hassle with curses apps is the OCRNL assumptions built into them. I have some new code for this to be released.
a. I'll see about ls's "help"
* James Haggerty
Messed around with using VSTa again (1.6.8) a few months ago, and ran across a number of things that annoyed me. None of them were really important, just annoying for the user. Didn't know what the right area was to post this - should there be a section here for 'Bug Reports'? I suppose someone can move all of this elsewhere. Anyway, here's the list of random whinging:
a. cvs checked out the vsta source with incorrect time/date stamps (some time in 2011 usually).
a. the line-editing in lib/getline.c supports ESC[A type keystrokes, but isr.c sends and termcap wants ESCOA (vt100)
a. the vt100 terminal definition has lines=24 - should there be a separate VSTa terminal?
a. gmake uses makefile instead of Makefile
a. mv can't do case changes - e.g. mv Makefile makefile. The file just disappears.
a. uname.c uses dynamically allocated character arrays where they may have disappeared. This means uname -r and uname -v sometimes fail.
a. cd ~ (and similar references to ~) seem to think ~ exists, but unfortunately it doesn't refer to the user's home directory
a. 'cp filename /' fails
a. the dos server's stat.c gives a rather annoying error message about timestamps being less than 1990. Since it assigns 1980 to files/directorys whose timestamp it can't determine (so you always get this message on 'cd /'), maybe this should be disabled?
a. it's annoying having every file with executable permission. How costly would it be to have checks for #! and the a.out signature (or however this stuff works)?
a. the curses library included seems to be old and buggy (it was doing very odd things for me at least, which don't happen at all with other curses I've tried). I did attempt to compile ncurses, but ./configure went down in flames and fixing this sort of stuff is way beyond me.
a. and for the totally trivial... 'ls -h' claims that --help is a valid option. It's not.
Phew. Think that's everything. Also wondering, Andy, if the mgr 0.69 port you mentioned on the mailing list some time ago is going to see the light anytime soon (the current mgr always seg faults on exit for me, and does other nasty things)?
* Andy Valencia
Welcome. Just edit this document, put your Q&A in, and we'll post answers back into this same document. If the information's really
good, it should make its way up and over to ["VSTa/Documentation"].