Yes, you too can run NetBSD 1.0 beta!

In article <37bf35$o67@darum.uni-mannheim.de> Andrew Wheadon,
andrew@wipux2.wifo.uni-mannheim.de writes:
>It is not documented since it will probably not be the final installation
>procedure. If you get 1.0_BETA and not 1.0 don't expect any of it to work
>and least of all expect any documentation. I'm fairly sure that whereever
>you got it from had an appropriate message to go with it.

Well! With many gyrations, I managed to get an i386/1.0beta release installed!
The main problem was that I had only one floppy drive.

If you have a hard disk, you can copy the install fs floppy to the hard
disk, and then
reboot and add the kernel. This will almost boot.

What you have to do is create an initial /dev directory with a few choice
entries.
Do this while you have the system running on the install floppy root.

The steps: (from memory -- a few days later)

1. Get the necessary floppies made. (See install for suggestions)
 BTW, "rawrite" is now "rawrite3" and can be found at a number of sites.

2. Boot from the Kernel floppy. Use the Install floppy for the file system.

3. Do all the disk formatting, per INSTALL instructions.

4. Copy the binary file from /bin/sh to /mnt/bin/sh.

5. WARNING------ Do not copy any other binaries they are really links to
the same file.
   Instead, you must use "ln" to create links to this combined executable.
   (We should have a shell script for this!)

6. Use "ls -lo /dev" to learn what the device numbers are.
   Manually build /mnt/dev to include the necessary items. (console, fd0a,
wd0a, wd0e, sd0e,
   come to mind) (Another script?)

7. Follow the install directions to add a kernel.

8. Boot from the hard disk.

9. Add the distribution sets to the hard disk /usr/distrib

10. Boot from the floppy, use the install floppy root.

11. Clean out the /mnt/bin and /mnt/sbin directories.

12. Install the distribution sets.

13. Reboot from the hard disk.