A/UX 2.0.1 questions

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <50005 at apple.Apple.COM> ksand at Apple.COM (Kent Sandvik) writes:
>In article <1991Mar6.181713.5362 at nas.nasa.gov> lumpkin at amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Forrest E. Lumpkin) writes:
>>1) Will A/UX 2.0.1 resolve the problem( undocumented feature:-) )
>>   of only one Mac partition per physical device (hard drive)?
>
>Well, the trick with patching _HFSDispatch in order to fake multiple
>HFS volumes on one single volume has always been a hack, and thus
>is not suppored by neither A/UX or MacOS.

Please. It works. Thousands of people use it, and you should support it.
No debate is permissible on this subject. :-)

>>2) Will the bugs in the installation software be resolved. With the present
>>   software intelligent use of dp is required unless one is setting up
>>   a one A/UX partition (/) hard disk arrangement?
>
>This is a scary area, where the installation program can't guess
>all the possible arrangements that the administrator would wish
>to have. I've tested both CMS and Silverlining for A/UX disk
>partitioning, and even if their interfaces are bizarre, they do
>their job quite well.

MicroNet's installer works best. Problem is, you can only get it with
their drives. (Which are worth the money, but that's a different issue.)

>Otherwise HD Setup with Apple harddisks asks for a rich set of
>possible A/UX setups before the installation. The installation
>software is quite different compared with the old A/UX 1.1
>installation program.

This is the real problem. It is disgraceful that HD Setup won't partition
3rd party drives. I wouldn't mind if it could put drivers on them too, but
that's not so critical. But Apple refuses to sell reasonably large disks,
and sticks us with the archaic and arcane dp. I was under the strong
impression that this was going to change in 2.0.1, but if I did hear such
a commitment, it wasn't kept. What happened to "easy to use" and "great user
interface"?

This whole thing makes me angry because Apple has already done the work.
All it would take to make HD Setup work would be the deletion of a few lines
of code.

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis