Re: making the NetBSD Sparc installer diskettes in a Debian system.

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 07:09:01PM -0700, peasthope%shaw.ca@localhost wrote:
> * How can disk2 of 1530843 bytes ever fit on a floppy of 
>   capacity 1.41 MiB?  Capacity according to Wikipedia.

Duh - that is a bug in that release - it seems to have been fixed for
the NetBSD-5.1RC3, could you try that instead?

> * I do not have a working NetBSD or Sun system.  Can the 
>   NetBSD commands be adapted to work in Debian?  How?

They should just work if you adapt the device name of the floppy device.
We should document any gotchas; if you run into any, please let us know.

> * For sake of interest, why is disk1 gzipped while disk2 
> is not?

The second "disk" image is actually a symbolic link to instfs.tgz and can
be used to populate a NFS root area if you choose to install via network;
it just happens to work (as ustarfs file system) on the second disk as well.

So actually it is gzipped, but you don't gunzip it before moving it onto a
floppy. The first disk image is a more regular ffs file system image, as
required by the embedded boot loader.

Martin