Precedence Network Computer and NetManager
Miscellaneous questions

1. Do NCs have a serial port?

   The current NCs do not have a serial port. The combo chip used supports two serial ports which are used internally for the smartcard reader and the infra-red receiver.

   However, Precedence are developing an adaptor which will fit to the parallel port and provide a RISCOS-compatible serial port. Please email us if you are interested in purchasing such a device.

   Contents

   ---

2. Are there Acorn NCs with 100baseTX ethernet?

   No.

   Contents

   ---

3. What upgrade routes are there from certain builds?

   Build 31 is the first public release that includes an upgrade option. However, it has always been possible to upgrade a build without reformatting a hard disc as long as the original is not NetBSD 1.2 (all CD builds were 1.3). The CD consists of a number of tar.gz files which are simply extracted from the root of the filesystem. However, to do this on an installed system, you'd need to be quite careful not to overwrite existing configuration files.

   With build 31, you can do the following:

   • Insert the CDROM (in the CDROM drive :-) )
   • Log in as root
   • Type mount /cdrom or choose Discs->Mount CDROM from the menu.
   • Type /cdrom/upgrade
   • You will be given the option of upgrading the boot sequence. It is preferable to do this, but you will lose any changes that have been made to any of the files in the boot sequence (e.g. Desktop, PreDesktop) or the !Login program. However, the old boot sequence will be backed up to OldBoot. Do not upgrade with this method twice as OldBoot will be deleted and then replaced by !NFSBoot, thus meaning you lose the original boot sequence.
   • This will upgrade:
     • NCWorks
     • Web-based admin
     • Apache binaries
     • ICA Client
     • The kernel
     • The configuration scripts (e.g. setup)
     • The on-line documentation
     • Various custom binaries
     • + the boot sequence if required
   Using the upgrade will not fix everything. It will not fix the bug referred to here though this is fixed with a clean install of build 31.

   Contents

   ---

4. What documentation is there on the NCManager?

   There is quite a lot of documentation on line. There is little, if any, written documentation. Places to look are:
   • This FAQ at http://www.precedence.co.uk/nc/faq.html
   • The NCWorks documentation which is available in every NCWorks application by clicking on the help (question mask) button on the tool bar
   • The technical on-line documentation at http://ncserver:880/private/docs/ If you log in as ncadmin on an NC, you will be presented with the NC administration pages and you will see a link to the on-line documentation. You will need to log in as ncadmin when prompted by the web-pages

   Contents

   ---

5. What are the differences between build 31 and build32?

   The major difference is that from an installation point of view, the CD will now install on both a RiscPC and a CATS board. Installation is also tidied up and all sets are now simple tar.gz files. In detail, the differences are:
   • Rewritten install script to install on both CATS and RiscPC
   • New CD layout to have 3 distribution directories (build - for common sets, buildrpc for the RiscPC and buildcats for the CATS)
   • Installation sets are all simple tar.gz files rather than legacy RiscBSD inst format.
   • Duplicate sets removed (e.g. games.00)
   • Unnecessary sets removed (e.g. fctools.00 is superceded by filecorefs in the kernel)
   • joe.tar.gz, perl.tar.gz and tcsh.tar.gz install in /usr/pkg/bin and link to /usr/local/bin for backwards compatibility
   • NetBSD packages removed (thus halving the size of the CD)
   • Upgrade script now installs hotfixes and can be used to upgrade from builds 26 - 30 to build 31.
   • All the latest hotfixes (to fix 46) are applied by default
   • /usr/local/samba/var/spool is now mode 777 by default (see here)
   • The help text in !Login.Messages is a little more helpful
   There is no need whatsoever to upgrade from build 31 to build 32. Simply, apply the relevant hotfixes to build 31 and type:

   chmod 777 /usr/local/samba/var/spool

   and you've got build 32. If you use the build 32 CD to apply the hotfixes, the chmod command will be run for you

   Contents

   ---

6. Are NCs cool?

   Yes.

   Contents

Next (Errors/Bugs on the NetManager)