I can not install FreeBSD 5.3 in an old Pentium 100 MHz

[Brian Bobowski]

Ramiro Aceves wrote:

> Hello I have been investigating (I have read all freebsd manuals and 
> search on the internet) and my old pentium machine has got the bad CMD 
> 640 disk controller. FreeBSD 5.3 says that it does NOT support it. I 
> think that they have removed support for it in the 5.x versions. I do 
> not know why I can not even see the kernel boot, I think it should 
> work until it mounts the first filesystem.

<snip>

> It seems that it is good time to throw away this old machine.... :-(
>
Well, salvage any hardware that you can; you never know, you just might 
find a compatible motherboard without a CPU, and then you'll be able to 
mix and match. (Speaking as someone who's missed too many scrounging 
opportunities, here.)

> PS: I am surprised that only one person answered my email. Did I ask 
> my question in the wrong mailing-list? If so, please tell me where I 
> should post it. 

Speaking for myself, I often will hold my peace if I feel that someone 
else has adequately answered the question; I'll only throw in an 
additional contribution if I feel it's necessary, that is, either the 
first to respond has left something out or they've stated something I 
think is incorrect or, at least, not appropriate to the OP's query. I 
just thought that was mailing-list typical; if you don't have anything 
to add that hasn't been said, some people just won't waste the 
bandwidth. This is certainly the right place for general questions about 
the OS and getting it to run; if the experienced residents of the list 
don't think it is the right place for something, they'll often advise 
you of such and even CC to the right list(which you could then sign up 
to through the mailman interface if you want to follow such things). 
Overall it's a pretty friendly bunch; you'd have to be quite obnoxious 
to actually incur wrath.

As an aside, when you reply to or forward e-mail, especially to a list, 
it's usually considered better form(because it keeps thoughts flowing in 
the right direction) to only include what's relevant to your 
reply(especially if the replied-to message is long), and to include your 
comments AFTER the text you're replying to. Note what I've done in this 
message - put my comments in right after what I was commenting to, 
deleted the rest(with that little <snip> marker to show that text was 
omitted which, while relevant, isn't enough so that it needs to be 
quoted in full; being overzealous in such deletion can be confusing, 
though). If the original message is very short, it's sometimes okay to 
just put your commentary after the entire message, but putting your 
comments at the top - although some readers do this by default - is bad 
form; this is what's known as top-posting(sometimes Jeopardy posting 
after the game show whose distinguishing feature is putting the answer 
before the question), and you may be asked to avoid it if you get into 
discussions with others while still using it. The only reason I myself 
would use it is if I'm forwarding something and need to provide the 
recipient(s) some general context first.

-BB