>Does it make it anything easier to have a installed Linux
>when installing NetBSD? I have a Linux box connected to
>the internet and want to install NetBSD on it (deleting Linux).
>It is a 486 with a 200MB HD. Just replacing the /vmlinuz with 
>/netbsd does not work for (at least) two reasons as i understand:
>
>1. Major and minor device numbers dont conform to any standard.
>   (is there any?)
>2. NetBSD does not understand ext2fs of Linux

Well, there are actually about a billion reasons it wouldn't work :-)  These
probably include:

- Lilo may not know how to load a netbsd executable
- NetBSD doesn't know how to run Linux binaries (you might be able to get
  by with Linux binary emulation, but I'm sure lots of things won't work).

In short, you really need to have the full system installed on top of the
other one (the same holds true if you go the other way as well).

>Is this correct?
>I asked this question years ago here once: 
>Would it be a good thing to have everywere (at least on NetBSD)
>the same major and minor ids? 

You mean, as the same as Linux?  I can't see a reason to do that (and it
wouldn't help you in this case).

>And to try to get help directly for my problem:
>Is there any filesystem that NetBSD and Linux know both and
>that would help to do my migration to NetBSD?

Well, there's always MSDOSFS.  I don't know of any others.

>Is there a way to boot my box on a NFS mounted NetBSD-rootfs and
>to install then via NFS?(security considerations are no
>big problem for me, at least as long only this machine is affected)

I think you might be able to do an NFS-mount off of one of the install
floppies ... but if you can do that, why not just ftp the installation
sets?

--Ken