Hi!

Thanks heaps for your response.  In your comment about accepting what
the BIOS thinks, obviously the NetBSD installer looks at BIOS data
areas and gathers the disk geometry info and the partitioning
programme in the installer fills in those values automatically?  So
then all I need to do is calculate by 512 bytes per sector to get
sizes of the partitions that I want (unless it offers me the ability
to append an M or G to a numeric value, and it assigns disk geometry
info for me.)

I am downloading the 386 packages ISO cd image now, the first CD, that
should be good enough for now until I get used to using the system.  I
found a package list on the ftp site you gave me which is very
helpful!  (I didn't know it existed.)  Now I can see what pre-compiled
packages are on what CDs.  That compilation of KDE sounds like a
nightmare, I think I will give it a miss :-)

I am not familiar with setting up networking, so I will forget cvssup
and so on for now until I get my head around it.  I will download the
CD iso's that I need to make it easier for me.  The thing I am likely
to have trouble with is getting my USB ADSL modem to work, and making
it work with PPPoE, and even then, I don't know how to do that, or
what number to dial to my provider (Windows says it's a DSL-WAN,
number 35,7 or whatever.  Blah.)

Thanks!!
:-)
James

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Kukat" <michael@bsdfans.org>
To: "James Buchanan" <jamesbuch@iprimus.com.au>
Cc: <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 11:14 PM
Subject: Re: Help to install NetBSD


> Hi !
>
> On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, James Buchanan wrote:
> > I need to get rid of Windows tonight and install NetBSD (so
preserving
> > partitions isn't a problem at all.)  What is a problem for me is
the
> > hard disk:  if I am greeted with something like setting my disk's
> > geometry, (I have a Seagate Barracuda 40GB HDD) what do I do, in
terms
> > of cylinders, heads, tracks and sectors?
>
> Something like "accept what BIOS thinks" should work in most cases.
I had only
> one machine so far not booting afterwards.
>
> > Also, I only have the first CD of NetBSD.  I need the basic NetBSD
> > system, with GCC, basic X setup (afterstep is my favourite),
printing
> > support (CUPS), SoundBlaster Audigy 5.1 card support, Xfree86 3.6
+,
> > Emacs, mail programme (mutt will do), and a D-Link DSL200 USB ADSL
> > modem.  Is all the software I need on the first CD-ROM?
>
> No. You just have the base system. But if you have a directory
calles "sources"
> on this disk, you can use pkgsrc to build all packages you need more
or less
> automatically. To get the precompiled packages, look at
ftp.netbsd.org.
> I usually have CVS pkgsrc handy and with fresh installations, i take
this
> pkgsrc and build everything with this newest repository. Having the
distfiles
> current mostly all the time, this is very useable.
>
> But there are large things, KDE for example needs about 8 hours to
build on a
> 1.6 GHz P-III
>
> ...Michael
>
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