NetBSD 5.0/i386 under Parallels 4.0 on on OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard)

[Giles Lean <giles.lean%pobox.com@localhost>]

Hi all,

For the benefit of the archive and search engines:

I have managed to install NetBSD-5.0/i386 in a Parallels Desktop 4.0
virtual machine running under OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard).

I had to choose the OS type as 'Solaris' (which then defaulted to
'version 10') in order to get a working ne2 virtual network interface;
the ne2 interface (the only one Parallels appears to provide) kept
timing out dhclient requests when I used either "Other/Other" or
"FreeBSD/7.x" as the guest operating system type.  (Parallels doen't
offer "NetBSD" as a guest operating system type.)

This was with a 'shared' (a.k.a. NAT) network configuration.  My testing
so far is a few DNS lookups and ping, so whether there are further
problems to be found under load or not I don't know. I haven't tried X11
(and probably won't).

As an aside, I have been unable to even boot NetBSD-5.0/i386 within
recent versions of VirtualBox.  Whether NetBSD works in VMware on OS X I
don't know.

Lastly, Parallels claims to be able to import VirtualBox machines or
disk images: I could not make this work for the couple of images I had
(Linux or Windows).  Maybe it only works for older VirtualBox versions;
maybe it doesn't work at all.

Cheers,

Giles