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Ok I have to know what the logic is by altering the /dev directory?...... not that I mind to horrably however I'm not a big fan of modifiying things outside of a some what standard..... However if I can be explained why it was decided to do it then I could understand it better.
In every Distro I have ever used Slackware, redhat, mandrake, sorcerer, gentoo, undead, debian, and probably a bunch more that I just can't remember at the moment. storage devices are located in /dev like trhis dev/hda1 etc. however in at least 0.4 it is not like this it is in /dev/IDE/somemore/another_one_I_can't_remember/ I don't seem to remember it being like this in 0.3 however I will assume it was like that.
Now it has never caused me more then 2 seconds of confusion. and never thought anything of it except that I didn't really care for it....... I didn't really know how off it throws thing till I finnally talked a couple of friends into trying out arch.... then the phone-calls started rolling in...... "I can't get lilo to install.... and when I think I do.... nothing happens after I reboot" of course I never thought that they would have problems.... and I could not think of why they were having problems.... I just kinda jokingly said welll are you sure you didn't forget something... I got it up and running fine.......
Finnaly I went over to one of there houses to see what was going on after about 3 days of phone calls and not one of them getting it on there systems proper like........ well what had happened is that they went in a modified the lilo.conf to look like what they are used to ie. /dev/hda1 / and so on and it threw me for a secopnd as I have said I have easily used at least 10 other distros... probably more. and at first I was confused it wasn't till I remembered that arch doesn't follow what I and a lot of others consider a standard as far as the /dev directory is conserned..... even though the default lilo.conf has it in how it is supposed to be people are not used to seeing it that way and thought it might be a mistake and modified it to how they are used to it being.
well like I've said It's only taken me at most 2 seconds to go oh yea I remember how this one works.... and fixed it and tried to explain it to them..... well unfortunitally none of them liked it much.... and didn't like how non standardized it was.... so they didn't want to mess with arch anymore.... Wich I see a being a bummer as I Like arch....... however I do kinda agree that /dev is one of those things that I belive the layout has been standardized..... and I do belive that Linux needs to follow standards for at least certain things and that in my eyes is one of them.
Now if I had some rational, logical explanation as to why it is done like that then I could be abit more understanding and when I have to explaine it to someone else again I would have more to say then..... well I guess they wanted to be diffrent, and felt there way is better( which I don't really agree with at the moment)
Anyway thanks for any expanation that is given. and sorry it was a long rant
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well, the old /dev-directory was pretty huge, so someone created the dynamic /dev-filesystem. He/She does that because modern distros got about 2000 different devices in /dev, but only about 50 are used, so all others were just corpses.
When he/she started with dev-fs, he/she tries to sort everything a bit, and that's what it makes a littlebit confusing.
But after a while you would love the dev-fs! You'll always find the device you were looking for! And you know, that if a device is present, the driver really works!
I think wether the old-fashioned nor the new way is easier. It's just different! And what does hda1 tells someone who has never used a unix/linux? /dev/discs/disc0/part1 is a littlebit longer, but it's self-descriptive! Even most important old device names are still present as symlinks!
I think Mandrake is using dev-fs too.... and other distros plan to use it!!
I hope I could answer you question!
Moritz
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ok thats kinda logical don't really know if it is better.... I don't know if Mandrake uses this..... as of 8.2 it did not... don't know of newer ones as I have not used them much (just not a big far of the newest mandrakes 9.x and up)
as far as what hda1 tells some one that has never used linux or unux is this
hda1
^^^
| | L------ partition number on the physical drive num starting at 1
| L------physical drive listed from a up, a being the first
|
L ------ hard drive
seems intuitive enough to me and every one that I have explained it to
and where do the sysmlinks to the old style reside? what a few of the people who were running into problems was this they would see the /dev/disks/something/part0 and would think it was a mistake so they would change it to /dev/hda1 ....... then when they went to install lilo it freaked out saying that it could not find /dev/hda1
whole thing just kinda reminids me of gobo linux and what they tried to do with the file-system.... I says leave it alone it works fine has been like that for well a LONG time and there are reasons behind it.... understand it before you change it..... this is kind of the same thing
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Ok I have done some reading on dev-fs and well still not sure it's a smart move..... but who am I to say. on another seprate note.... another thing that is problematic is that I typically mount my cd-drives as scsi devices ie /dev/sr0 and /dev/sr1 as I have noticed that it seems to me that cd-roms and burners act much better that way then mounted as ide devices... but thats just me and what I'm used to... typically when I have installed arch befor and latly I have just left it at it's default... as I seem to have recalled having dificulties doing that. however now that I have read up on it I know what the problem was and how to fix it.....
I would sugest making a note on the site if one does not already exist explaining dev-fs and maybe linking to some documentation on it..... this is the site that I read up on it... probably do some more looking into it at a later time http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/ … devfs.html
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Personally I think using devfs is a good move, it removes a lot of clutter. Other distros will follow.
As for documentation it is explained in the unofficial FAQ. Devfs support is also mentioned in the introduction to the official documentation. Since this seems to not be enough a short note and link could be added to the official docs, perhaps "3.1 Configuration files --- /etc/fstab" might be the place for it. (Btw /etc/fstab really should be mentioned before /etc/lilo.conf in that section.)
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and where do the sysmlinks to the old style reside? what a few of the people who were running into problems was this they would see the /dev/disks/something/part0 and would think it was a mistake so they would change it to /dev/hda1 ....... then when they went to install lilo it freaked out saying that it could not find /dev/hda1
I got symlinks by default! Maybe you've to check your /etc/devfs.conf! I could send you a list of my /dev directory, if you want to... It just contains a few new directories (i.e. /dev/discs) and some symlinks (i.e. /dev/hda1 -> /dev/discs/disc0/part1)
/dev/discs/disc0/part1 is even the same as /dev/hda1, it's just longer...
| | |
V V V
/dev/ hd a 1Offline
you can still mount your cd-roms & cd-writers as dev/sr1. just enable the ide-scsi module in your rc.conf, then make a symbolic link
ln -s scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd /dev/sr0
Hapy.
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