RE: Insights from successful, yet painful, install attempt.

[Carlos Milán Figueredo <cmilanf%hispamsx.org@localhost>]

Hi Roc!

From: Roc Vallès <vallesroc%gmail.com@localhost>
Sent: lunes, 4 de octubre de 2021 17:09
> Re: 3.2, did they really solve booting from bootblocks above 4GB? I
> can't find anything on that subject.

Not sure about bootblocks, but kickstart supports storage > 4 GB. For what is worth, I kept the NetBSD partitions below the 4 GB boundary to minimize problems.

> 1992... I'm afraid that's not going to support NSD nor TD64 ;-)

I guessed no :) NetBSD or Linux seems to be the logical choice to do proper dd on the Amiga, but NetBSD lack of RDB partition table and mapping to dev file makes it a bit frustrating.

> I have no idea how the install image is generated either. Being able to
> look at all that would indeed help; besides fixing some, I'd probably be
> able to find further issues :-)

I took a look to the source tree, but I was not able to find it... I wonder where it can be; that said, I am not familiar at all with NetBSD source.

> That's a sure-fire method that absolutely will work, but I avoid it on
> principle. It'd feel like I'm giving up on doing it on-target.

Indeed, it feels like tricking. There shouldn't be any problem to install the system from real hardware. A SCSI controller and CDROM drive is not the most common setup nowadays.

> Now, I have some packages installed on that netbsd, and I've played with
> X forwarding (displaying X11 apps on my laptop instead). I'm sad about
> there being few packages built in the repositories. There's no "modern"
> webbrowser (webkit/blink), but there's also no netsurf, almost no window
> managers. Also no wxgtk, which also means no wxpython.

I was hoping to setup fvwm, but the repository has only ctwm as alternative to twm. Sadly, it crash on my Amiga. About webbrowsers, well, I don't think even a 68060 can handle any modern web browser besides Netsurf, they would be painfully slow.

> As building packages on Amiga is slow (I have some experience doing that
> on netbsd 8), binary packages are critical. I hear that the reason we
> have few packages is that even with emulation, there's serious ram
> restrictions (2GB and ~512MB per process, due to limitations of current
> netbsd code around the m68k mmu), and that severely restricts the
> packages that can be built natively, or semi-natively (emulated m68k
> running netbsd).

I don't have knowledge on the matter, but I believe the people from Debian GNU/Linux m68k are quite successful building Amiga packages. They use a qemu toolchain if I recall correctly with testing on ARAnyM. Maybe NetBSD could benefit from their ways... but mine is not a qualified opinion :)

Regards,
Carlos

Carlos Milán Figueredo | HispaMSX System Operator | http://www.hispamsx.org | telnet://bbs.hispamsx.org | https://calnus.com