There are a few glitches in the newest snapshot for the alpha,
at least on a dec multia. I am booting using the cd/hd disk image
that was in the installation directory.

I am totally unable to use the sysinst program to install the snapshot,
as after the file systems are made, the filesystems are then unmounted,
and the files that should be loaded onto the new filesystems are then
loaded into /mnt of the ramdisk.

I bypassed this by then copying the contents of the /mnt directory into
the proper location after mounting the partitions. I then untarred the
binary sets, and did MAKEDEV in /mnt/dev to get the device files. Then
I had to run /mnt/usr/dec/installboot to make the drive bootable.
(part of this operation was done using a 1.3.3 bootable drive, but my
memory isn't complete on the sequence)

The system boots, but there are still some glitches. The passwd command
will not work, giving a "passwd: unknown user root" error.

The sysinst program really needs some more bells and whistles. The ability
to start at whatever step you want is one of them, hopefully remembering the
last state that you set. I spend a couple hours playing with it, each time
making new filesystems over and over on top of valid filesystems.

Another problem was that the automatic filesystem partitioning didn't work
correctly having booted off the drive i was installing onto. I needed to
do a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c count=1" to zero out the info from the
initial disk image. I then got reasonable partition sizes (well, sort of...
not anything like I would use, but...).

Since I can't get to the later stages of sysinst, I don't know whether it
will try to set up your networking and related stuff.

Another problem that I ran into was that neither ftp nor nfs was able to
access the sets that I downloaded. I could run ftp command manually ok, 
but then I was unable to get the local hard drive mounted, along with the
partitions I was trying to install onto. 

Conceptually, the sysinst program looks like a good step. One thing to
possibly change is the "press any key to continue" line so that it is
more obvious... a monochrome monitor doesn't show it up well.

Overall, the new sysinst doesn't seem ready for prime time, and the snapshot
has uncertainties also. How do i get the passwd command to work?

The kernel itself seemed to boot up ok though, and I will continue to tinker 
with it as time permits. Hopefully this is detailed enough feedback regarding
the snapshot that the problems can be duplicated and fixed.

-- 
Joseph Sarkes                   mailto:joe@mediaone.net