[SunRescue] BSD Questions

[Jonathan Katz]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Pullig, Bruce A. wrote:

:I'd like to try BSD on my SPARCstation LX.  Can anyone point me to an ISO
:image?  

I don't think any BSD (other than FreeBSD for Alpha and x86) does ISOs. 
Check out www.openbsd.org and www.netbsd.org for more info. It's probably
easier using dd under Solaris to copy one of the BSD ramdisk miniroots over 
to Solaris' swap space and then booting off that partition. ... and you won't
even need to waste a CD-R or the time it takes to burn one. It actually
shouldn't be that hard. The proceedure would look like:

1) boot into single-user mode
2) use 'swap -d' to turn off swap (swap -d /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s1 or such)
3) use dd if=ramdisk.fs of=/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s1 bs=32k 
	(using a larger blocksize makes it go much faster)
4) reboot -- disk:b  (tells Mr. PROM to boot off your 2nd partition) 
5) follow the OS install (whether it be Open or NetBSD.)

:Will BSD run with just 32MB ram well enough to play MP3s?  I tried Solaris
:2.6 & 7 and it was too choppy.

It should. I know for sure that Linux can, and I heard that BSD could. FWIW
at one place I was working at we had a 70Mhz SS5 running Solaris barely
playing mp3s.

:Is there an MP3 player (GUI or command line) for BSD?

Read up on BSD a bit and learn about the 'ports' collection. The program
you're looking for is called 'mpg123' and supports some cool things like
'random play' all from the command-line.

Good Luck and let us know how it goes.

-Jon
-- 
Jonathan Katz
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