System Setup:

Mac II
Toby Frame Buffer
Kinetics Ethernet
FDDI interface

1 GB Harddrive:
Partitioned:
Usual mac junk, partition table, and driver.
A/UX Root & Usr
A/UX Swap
HFS "BSD Archive"
HFS "MachTen Archive"
A/UX misc. partition.

.5 GB Hardrive (System folder, etc.)

Binaries:

OBSOLETE/BETA-1 (dated May 4, 1994, or so)
Booter 1.1
'MacSide' utilities available as of 10/14/94 on cray-ymp.acm.stuorg.vt.edu.

--------
After getting the set of binary '*.tgz' into my BSD Archive partition, and
performing a Mkfs on the various partitions to be used by MacBSD,
the installation went pretty well.

However, I did use the kernels found in 'new_kernels' on the vt.edu archive.
It took some time for me to realize that the BETA-1 and the new kernels were
probably totally out of sync with each other. I used the BETA-1, as I could
not find any later full binaries which may correspond to the kernels in
new_kernels/*.

When I dropped back the the 'netbsd' found in the BETA-1 binaries the system
seemed to come up. However there were a few discrepancies from the FAQ
and what I observed to happen.

1) The system came up in single user mode regardless of the setting for the
boot flags.

2) In single user mode, when I issued a ^D to exit single-user mode and
come up in multi-user mode, the installation 'rc' did not properly reopen
the 'tty' and so did not pause on the question of the disk drive.

When it got a null response it pluged in the default drive number of '0' which
in my case was ok. However, the install rc copies the 'rc.distribution' to 'rc'
and then does an 'exec rc'. Unfortunately the as delivered 'rc.distribution' is
not marked as 'executable' and so the script fails, and drops the user back
into single-user mode.

Once I did a 'chmod u+x rc.distribution' this problem went away.

3) On the 'netbsd' kernel of the BETA-1 distribution, date 5/4/94, my Mac II
go a few 'scsi timeout' errors. This was intermittent, and after a couple of
trys, the system came up in multi-user-mode.

4) The password file on the distribution has all login names disabled, so I got
to the multi-user point with out the ability to login...so after a reset, fsck,
and an edit of the passwd file, I was able to get into the system after going
multi-user.

5) The kernel 'found' my various peripherals. However, in the case of the
ethernet adaptor, which is one of the oldest in the line, the 'netbsd-050494'
does not seem to have 'if_ae'(or whatever) in it. In earlier fooling around with
the other kernels, when they did attempt to start up, they crashed at the point
were I presume the ethernet was being 'ifconfig'-ed (That's a guess as to what
happend).

-------------- QUESTIONS ----------


So, where does one get later versions of the whole binary set, which match the
later kernels found in 'new_kernels'?

When will the sources to the 'MacSide' utilities be available, so that I can
put tape support into the 'install' function. (I realize that the entire Mac
community may think of tape as 'what one hears MOOF sounds on', but I personally
like to put large piles of data on tape rather than have to have nearly twice
as much disk space as I need to install the binaries).

An alternative would be to have a min-boot setup which copies into the BSD disk
a minimal set of stuff which could then allow the netbsd kernel itself to
support
getting the reset of the universe off of tape, or even, parish the thought, a
remote mounted NFS archive. (No, Matilda, FDDI doesn't even speed up
AppleShare...).


John Clark
clark@synergy.encinitas.ca.us