From: dale@mkseast.uucp (Dale Gass) Subject: Misc. problems with latest SLS Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1993 14:52:34 GMT
I grabbed the latest SLS of mit.edu on the weekend and installed it. I was
impressed from start to finish with ease of installation, reliability,
speed, etc., etc.. X, TCP/IP with slip, and everything else I've tried
worked with a minimum of effort. Compiling X application is also a breeze
(a lot easier than trying to get them to work on Xenix).
However, I have encountered a couple of minor problems:
1) The second time that the last client closes on the X server, it dies
unceremoniously. (Running with xdm, the second time I exit to get back
to the login prompt, the system appears to hang. I traced it to the X
server dying on a SIGHUP, and xdm exiting because of it; X dies without
resetting the video mode, keyboard, etc., so it appears as a hang.)
2) xdm doesn't run the setup, startup, or reset scripts. I've disabled
server grabbing and that didn't help. I grabbed the xdm sources, rebuilt
it, and that seems to work. Something must be weird in that particular
build.
3) Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't appear to work for me. It seems to be enabled in
the kernel.
4) I can't seem to shut down the system without the next boot telling me
that the file system isn't clean. Shouldn't reboot sync the disks and
mark them as clean?
5) On occasion, after mounting a DOS floppy or hard disk, attempts to
unmount it will report that the device is busy. (No processes are
using it, nobody has the mount point as their current dir, etc., etc..
I wonder if the kernel is keeping some reference to it that's screwing
things up.)
6) I created a 24M swap partition, and when I use swapon, it reports that
it's using 16M of it (I have 16M RAM). Can't the swap space be larger than
the RAM?
Questions:
1) Is there any way to flip in an out of the X server, to get back
to the virtual terminals? CTRL-ALT-Fn will get me out, but I
can't seem to get back.
2) I've read that the swap space is used for paging, not traditional
swapping. Does this mean that only individual pages are written
out as required? Am I correct in assuming that text segments
aren't written out, just data (since text pages can be re-read
from the executable)? (I've run many large X clients,
and haven't seen swap space used, even though the memory is
exhausted.)
3) It would be nice to mount System-V file systems. Anybody working
on that?
I'll be switching from Xenix to Linux after a bit more testing, and when
time permits. I just can't see any justification for sticking with Xenix.
Linux offers more applications, source code, better system facilities
(*especially* mounting of DOS drives; what a timesaver!)... About the only
thing Xenix has over Linux is reliability, and Linux will only get more
reliable due to the growing number of users and hackers (and with source, I
can find and fix the problems myself :-)
-dale
-- Dale Gass, Mortice Kern Systems, Atlantic Canada Branch Business: dale@east.mks.com, Pleasure: dale@mkseast.uucp