Hi,

Thanks for this Steve.  I ran the NetBSD Live CD and sampled the
installation/config screens, and it seems reasonable, but lots of
things fly past and I miss them (keyboard mappings etc) but of course
I didn't see the disk partitioning bit.  The installer needs serious
work to correct things flying past off screen with never the chance to
see them.

My video card works it seems, but 386Live did not want to start KDE
for some reason.  The grey screen with the X mouse pointer came up,
mouse moving OK etc, but then it died.  The KDE window didn't start,
and I got a console instead.

I am worried about the modem issue, and maybe I will just get a 56K
serial modem (hardware modem that works with Linux) since it's likely
that it will work.  At least then I can use one of my narrowband
accounts to dialup and get help on the list if I need to.

I am halfway downloading the second i386 CD in a 7-CD set! :-/  There
are some nice pre-compiled packages on the 2 CDs for i386 that I will
have in the next hour.  That gives me emacs, CUPS and so on.  That
will have to do.  I can't afford a $500 bill to download all those ISO
CD images :-)

Thanks for taking the time to respond Steve.  If an AT&T researcher
can find things a challenge I don't see what hope I've got :-(

;-)

Warmly,
James



----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
To: "James Buchanan" <jamesbuch@iprimus.com.au>
Cc: <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 2:36 AM
Subject: Re: Help to install NetBSD


> In message <000f01c2d0fc$fda23fc0$59951ad3@windows>, "James
Buchanan" writes:
> >Hello list,
> >
> >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?
> >
> >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?
> >
> >Does anyone have any tips for me? :-)
>
> You may find this harder than you'd like.  The disk installation is
> likely to be confusing but work well -- in my experience, the
defaults
> are generally good enough.
>
> X setup, on the other hand, I always find to be a challenge...
>
> I have no idea if your sound card or DSL model are supported.  The
> latter is especially critical, because pkgsrc per se is just a
> framework; to install most packages, you need to download things.
Of
> the components you list, CUPS, Emacs, and Mutt are not part of the
base
> system.  I don't know if there are precompiled packages for any of
> these.  (I just tried to check, but I think that Galeon is having
trouble
> with ftp URLs.)
>
> --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
> http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)
>
>