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Remove obsolete "Why are usernames restricted to 8 characters" question.

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Rewrite DOS binaries question to reflect the modern age, and to not
imply that dosemu development is hugely ongoing project.
This commit is contained in:
Michael Lucas 2003-06-12 16:42:10 +00:00
parent 1afa61544b
commit fa679d240f
Notes: svn2git 2020-12-08 03:00:23 +00:00 
svn path=/head/; revision=17267
1 changed files with 6 additions and 50 deletions
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56
en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml
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@ -11302,63 +11302,19 @@ raisechar=^^</programlisting>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="login-8char">
<para>Why are login names restricted to 8 characters or less
in FreeBSD 2.2.X and earlier?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>You would think it would be easy enough to change
<literal>UT_NAMESIZE</literal> and rebuild the whole world,
and everything would just work. Unfortunately there are often
scads of applications and utilities (including system tools)
that have hard-coded small numbers (not always
<literal>8</literal> or <literal>9</literal>, but oddball ones
like <literal>15</literal> and <literal>20</literal>) in
structures and buffers. Not only will this get you log files
which are trashed (due to variable-length records getting
written when fixed records were expected), but it can break
Suns NIS clients and potentially cause other problems in
interacting with other Unix systems.</para>
<para>In FreeBSD 3.0 and later, the maximum name length has
been increased to 16 characters and those various utilities
with hard-coded name sizes have been found and fixed. The fact
that this touched so many areas of the system is why, in fact,
the change was not made until 3.0.</para>
<para>If you are absolutely confident in your ability to
find and fix these sorts of problems for yourself when and
if they pop up, you can increase the login name length in
earlier releases by editing
<filename>/usr/include/utmp.h</filename> and changing
UT_NAMESIZE accordingly. You must also update MAXLOGNAME
in <filename>/usr/include/sys/param.h</filename> to match
the UT_NAMESIZE change. Finally, if you build from
sources, do not forget that /usr/include is updated each
time! Change the appropriate files in
/usr/src/.. instead.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="dos-binaries">
<para>Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Yes, starting with version 3.0 you can use BSDI's
<application>doscmd</application> DOS emulation which has
been integrated and enhanced. Send mail to the &a.emulation;
if you are interested in joining this ongoing effort!</para>
<para>Yes, you can use the integrated
<application>doscmd</application> DOS emulation program to run a subset of DOS commands.<para>
<para>For pre-3.0 systems, there is a neat utility called
<application>pcemu</application> in the ports collection
which emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run DOS
text mode applications. It requires the X Window System
(provided as XFree86).</para>
<para>If <application>doscmd</application> will not suffice, the add-on utility
<filename role="package">pcemu</filename>
emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run many DOS
text mode applications. It requires the X Window System.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>