sysinst for NetBSD-amiga

["Bernardo Innocenti" <bernie%cosmos.it@localhost>]

Hello,

 I finally managed to add support for the amiga port into sysinst,
the official GUI-driven NetBDD installation program which is
available for most platforms.

 The sysinst source code lives in the /usr/src/distrib/utils/sysinst
directory. Two weeks ago I took the -current source tree and created
the arch/amiga subdirectory by copying the i386 specific stuff.
Of course I had to srip away all the i386 specific stuff, including
MBR handling and partitioning. In order to build the latest sysinst,
the latest version of the /usr/bin/menuc utility must be installed.
This starts a cascade effect that forces you to upgrade the whole
userland to -current before you are able to build sysinst.

 The result is a somewhat working sysinst binary which does not allow
to make partitions, but should still allow to install the bootblock
code.

 Unfortunately I couldn't test myself the installation procedure with
sysinst because I don't have any free space on my hard disk for a
second NetBSD installation and I don't want to revert my current
system to a bare 1.4 system.

 I also don't know how to modify the Makefiles involved in the
creation of the miniroot filesystem to replace the current shell
scripts with sysinst.

 In order to test sysinst, the original 1.4 miniroot must be mounted
using a loopback filesystem. In case the image isn't big enough to
hold sysinst, a bigger one can be created by using dd to create a
file of the desired length. Then use newfs to create a filesystem
in this file and mount it with the loopback. Copying the files from
the old miniroot to the new one is probably done best with tar
because the miniroot contains some special files and links.

 I'm not including the source code and binaries because I'm not sure
whether it is allowed to post encoded stuff in this mailing list, but
I can send them to anybody interested.

--
   _  Bernardo Innocenti <bernie%cosmos.it@localhost>
_ //  Amiga & UNIX developer - Sysop of SystemShock BBS
\X/   WWW: http://hermes.cosmos.it/~bernie - IRC: Bernie