Re: NetBSD wishlist

["Thomas Mueller" <mueller6724%bellsouth.net@localhost>]

> Instant-on. The work done to reduce Chrome OS boot time makes a lot of sense, 
> IMHO. Of course, many need to have more control over the boot process, but 
> end users don't care. Also, instant-on after sleep is great.

I am one end user who cares, I need to be able to boot netbsd -a to select the 
root device, since I have to boot indirectly using a disk image which I boot 
using grub4dos, running under FreeDOS.

> + NetBSD LIVE CD/USB with each release ...

That sounds like a good idea; Jibbed already does that 
(http://www.jibbed.org/): CD but not USB.

NetBSD can be installed onto a USB drive; I installed 4.0.1 onto a 4 GB USB 
stick, might try with -current mainly to get a preview. With NetBSD-current, I 
would need to be able to compile a custom kernel.

Live USB image should allow using the rest of the space on the USB drive.

I installed NetBSD 5.1 using the memstick image (adventuresome), can't boot USB 
directly on my computer but booted with the help of PLoP boot manager 
(http://www.plop.at/), which kernel in turn was booted using grub4dos running 
under FreeDOS.

FreeBSD offers USB memstick images for releases now: include base system, 
documentation, and live rescue file system.

I was hoping to copy the source .tgz sets to this USB stick, but unfortunately 
the image was so set up to make the rest of the USB stick inaccessible.  Also, 
since most of the content in this memstick image was already tgz'ed, I think it 
would be better to make the downloadable image available not gzip'ed; very 
little space is saved by gzip'ing.  But I think this is the first time NetBSD 
has offered memstick image for installation, albeit only for i386 and amd64.

Tom