DragonFly installation experience / suggestions

[Michael Neumann <mneumann@xxxxxxxx>]

Hey,

Once again I changed from FreeBSD to DragonFly :)

Here's a list of a few problems I encountered and what I think
could be improved:

* After installation, my laptop BIOS hung up. I had to manually
  intercept the installation process and issue "fdisk -BIC". The "-C"
  option seems to be important here. This wasn't neccessary on
  NetBSD/FreeBSD. The -C option does not exist in FreeBSD's fdisk, maybe
  there do it more intelligently?

* "kldload if_ipw" led to a kernel panic, whereas if_ipw_load="YES" in
  /boot/loader.conf works.

* In FreeBSD there is a /etc/rc.d/ipw script, that load the firmware
  into the driver (ipwcontrol -i ipw0 -f firmwarefile). IIRC,
  FreeBSD 7.0 will even include the firmware file and add a sysctl like
  "kern.license.ipw", which you have to set to agree the Intel license.
  It's very annoying to install a system, if this firmware is not
  shipped with the base system, as you need to get connected with a
  cable to fetch this firmware!

* Would it be possible to preset the PKG_PATH to for example
  pkgsrc-box.org? This would make life much easier for beginners.

* moused: There's no easy way (at least I know of) to run with two mice.
  I've to do:

    moused -t auto -p /dev/ums0
    moused -t auto -p /dev/psm0

  But that's not possible with moused_enable/flags in /etc/rc.conf.

* After having added a lot of binary packages, I tried to install
  another one from source. This required libxml-someversion, which
  seemed to be already installed (by a binary package). Despite, it
  stopped and told me that I either should remove the package
  (pkg_delete) or that I should issue bmake replace. Oh, I did
  "bmake replace", and this first removed a few packages (my window
  manager and stuff like that!).

  I don't understand what's the problem, why pkgsrc want's to install
  that package even if it's already installed.

* pkgsrc: If you install www/firefox from source, this will install
  firefox 2.x. If you do "pkg_add firefox", this will install
  firefox-15.

* What would be really cool, if pkgsrc could mix binary and packages
  from source. So if I do "pkg_add thispackage", it tries to add all
  packages it can find as binary, the others it will build from source.
  The same if you do "bmake", given an option, it would first try to add
  binaries for all the dependencies.

* Installing ipw-firmware, a message says to modify ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES
  accordingly in /etc/mk.conf. I do it, but the same message occurs,
  until I realize that there is /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf that I have to
  modify.

* Uh, and if DragonFly would get pkgjam.org that would be great! I don't
  know what the general opinion of pkgsrc developers about
  pkgjam.org is...

* What I'd like to see ported is trunk(4) from OpenBSD and lagg(4) from
  FreeBSD (7.0) for link aggregation / trunking. If I understand that
  correctly, it would allow me to seamlessly switch between
  wireless/wired networks at runtime.

Other than that I'm really happy with DragonFly so far.

Regards,

  Michael