Re: sysinst and gpt

[Chuck Swiger <cswiger%mac.com@localhost>]

On Jan 15, 2012, at 2:28 AM, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> I feel I need to build NetBSD from source because the binary distribution 
> doesn't work.

The release engineers who build NetBSD distributions would be sad to hear that, 
undoubtedly.

If you were a little more verbose about the problem(s),
folks might be able to offer some suggestions. 

> Also there are some things wrong with the included X, one being ability to 
> copy and paste only a small amount of lines at one time.

Copy/paste between X11 apps which used different widget sets was completely 
broken when I first tried it (which was back around 1990).  I've been told that 
copy/paste between apps which use same widget set-- ie, only KDE apps, or only 
GNOME apps, etc-- is supposed to work or at least work better nowadays.

> Another thing is inability to go into X with the generic kernel.

I'm not sure what that means.

At least at one point, there was no interactions between X and the kernel at 
all-- all the X server wanted was /dev/vid0 (or whatever the framebuffer device 
was) to have read/write permissions.  Newer versions of X would like video 
driver support for MESA/OpenGL and DRI to facilitate fast 3D rendering, but 
those are handled as extensions.

> Of course, getting a working NetBSD by building from source is a doubtful 
> proposition.

Why?  The developers and release engineers who build NetBSD are building it 
from source; they don't sit there with 8 dip switches and a commit button, or a 
hexadecimal keypad, to write binary values to memory.

:-)

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck