The following is a documentation of the process I 
underwent to get MacBSD working on my IIsi.  Perhaps it 
will shed light for those others who are still struggling.
If you already have BSD working, you can stop reading now.


Dan's notes on installing NetBSD_Mac
------------------------------------

I successfully got MacBSD to work on my IIsi the other day and I
thought it might be useful to make a record of the things I had to do
to make it work.  When I say 'successfully' I mean that it worked
over the serial port- not from the keyboard!  

The following summary was written after my success, and I will gloss
over most of the false starts which I encountered 

1.  I partitioned my external hard drive with Alliance power tools.
    I created a 20Mb Mac partition, an 8Mb swap partition, and a 67Mb
    AUX partition which I renamed "BSD Root".  The partitioning
    software forced me to create some other partitions also, such as
    an AUX eschatology partition.  I let it do this and they don't 
    bother me.  Then I ran Mkfs on the partition.

2.  I installed netbsd10, etc10, base10 with the BSD installer
    program, and then selected Make Devices from the file menu.
    When I first tried to install base10 the installer crashed 
    in the middle.  I tried again and it worked fine.  I'm told 
    increasing the memory that the installer gets fixes this also.
    This is done by selecting the installer in the finder and choosing
    "Get Info" from the file menu, then changing 1000 to 1500.

3.  I got a copy of the MRG kit which included version 1.6 of the
    booter.  

4.  After some difficulty with the netbsd10 and MRG kernels, I
    downloaded a copy of netbsd10.patched.  I installed this and made
    sure that the patched kernel was at /netbsd

5.  I had attached my old Data General Personal/One 8088 to the serial
    port via a modem cable and a null modem.  I tested the link
    between the two computers by running a terminal emulator on either
    end and typing back and forth.  (Crosstalk on the Data-Gen, Zterm
    on the Mac)  I set the parameters for both sides to 9600 baud,
    8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, full duplex, handshaking
    didn't appear to make any difference.  After some fiddling, I
    determined that pin 3 off one side of my null modem was shot.
    I tried to fix it, but I managed to destroy the null modem in the 
    process.  I bought a new null modem at Radio Shack for $4.95.
    The serial link was then much more reliable.

6.  In the booter, I checked the boxes for single user, grey bars,
    serial boot echo-  I also *unchecked* auto-ram size and set the
    memory size to 1Mb less than what I actually had. (This step is
    probably only needed on machines with split bank memory like the 
    IIsi.)   The kernel was booted from the BSD filesystem, and was
    named netbsd.

7.  Before booting, I made sure that virtual memory was off, and I was
    using 32 bit addressing mode.  Since I was not planning to use the
    screen, I left it in 8bit color.

8.  I booted it into single user mode.  Glory be; it worked!
    In order to actually use it however, I had to execute the command
    `mount -rw /dev/sd0a /`  which mounts the file system read-write.
    (The default for single user mode is apparently read-only.)
    (Interestingly, the proverbial grey bars were blue bars when I
    left the screen in 8bit color.)

9.  Unfortunately, it would not boot multi-user.  For a while I used
    it in single user mode- and I got the comp10 distribution and the 
    kernel source.  While trying to recompile the kernel, I ran out of
    space on the partition.  I cleared more space by deleting the
    sources in /sys/arch for all architectures except m68k and mac68k.
    This left enough room to compile the kernel and install most of 
    emacs19.28 (but not all of it; enough to use)  I also cleared
    space temporarily by deleting programs that are only useful in a 
    networked environment- which I don't have right now.

10. I was under the mistaken impression that the following problem was
    fixed in release 1.0 but apparently not:  In order to boot
    multi-user over the serial port, it was not sufficient to click on
    serial console.  I had to edit the file /etc/rc and remove the
    line "ttyflags -a", and I had to edit the /etc/ttys file to enable
    getty on the serial ports.  On the line with ttye0 I changed 'on'
    to 'off', and on the lines with tty00 and tty01 I changed 'off' to
    'on'.

    Note:  I did this by using the installer to cpout the files I
    wanted to edit and then edited them using Marc Parmet's Emacs
    port for the mac.  This program is strange in the way that it 
    handles newlines and carriage returns;  when I used the installer
    to cpin the files, it did it, but if I tried to see them in the 
    installer using the 'cat' or 'more' commands, the appeared blank
    because the newlines had been converted to carriage returns.  
    I worked around this by saving the files as 'rc.bin' which fools
    Parmet's emacs into not doing \n->\r conversion.  In hindsight
    it would have been easier to use the unix version of emacs in 
    single-user mode.

After both /etc/rc and /etc/ttys were edited, the system successfull
booted multi-user.  Praise Zoroaster!
I now have a working version of UNIX on my mac, and got to play with
it for at least a whole day before I sent it to Brad to have the ADB
code fixed.
 

-good luck
Daniel Risacher