Hi all,
Last week I tried to install netbsd in a laptop and had problems with the
generic and laptop kernels, none of them loaded properly, I was reading the
installation notes that come in the INSTALL.txt, I read something about some
systems having problems with PCMCIA, they say there are two kinds of common
problems, one with interrupts, the other with IO ports, the former is
reconizable for locking the whole system, while the latter has other much
"softer" effects. So I thought it could be causing the problem in my laptop
and decided to follow the instructions to change the values of the kernel
variables using gdb. I copied, unzip and renamed the generic kernel from the
cd (previously installed the tiny kernel which did work), opened it
with --write in gdb and did what the notes sugested. I then rebooted the
system and this time the booting screen passes by the line it used to stop
in, but it locks again some lines below, this time the lock is not as hard
as it used to be. With the unmodified generic kernel, the lock didn't let me
reset, not even with the button, so I had to remove the power to be able to
get out of it. Now, after the gdb stuff, it can (at least) be reseted after
freezing. I am puzzled by the fact that an OS kernel freezes during boot
time when it has problems with a hardware device, more so knowing that
NetBSD is a very mature OS. I thought at this time, the kernel could abort
or ignore that hardware (not detect it at all) and continue, but it doesn't.
Any ideas?

My second question is concerning X. I would like to (once I get over the
kernel problem) install X on my laptop. I have never configured X in a
laptop. Mine has a NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go with 32 MB RAM, it would like to
have it working, of course, but I guess there is no support for it yet. I
tried the three NVIDIA cards from the xf86config database, but none worked.
My screen fills with vertical lines and after I ctrl-alt-backspace, the text
screen gets filled with funny characters in text mode. I tried telling
xf86config to use 5 MB RAM, then 32MB, but it didn't work. Could someone
tell me a working setup to have X running (and showing) in a laptop even
without using NVIDIA factures? I mean, a basic working configuration for X
in a laptop screen?

Thanks in advance.