Now that I see more activity on the list, I had these questions regarding NetBSD on Amiga, does anyone know an answer?
1. Is it possible to change console colors from black over grey to white over black? I have seen it is possible to control it via the wsconsctl, but I have not been successful using that tool on Amiga, maybe it is related by the lack of wsfb support for native chipset? 2. Related to 1, is it possible to have a color console with native chipset?
Not sure about these, but if the WSCONS kernel works, then the regular docs about how to do this will work, too.
http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-9/latest/amiga/binary/kernel/netbsd-WSCONS.gz
3. In Linux I can switch between multiple shells with ALT+F1, ALT+F2... Is there a way to do something in a similar fashion with the NetBSD console?
You can try the WSCONS kernel, and enable ttyE0-E3 in /etc/ttys, then add wscons=YES to /etc/rc.conf.
4. I am using the GENERIC kernel. Are there other kernels on Amiga that could be useful for my setup? (68060 + AGA + built-in IDE + PCMCIA network card).
Is there any other hardware you're using that isn't currently recognized?
5. Any instructions for building my own kernel?
Get the source tree. Edit your own kernel configuration file in src/sys/arch/amiga/conf/. Then, in src, run something like this (the locations are up to you):
/build.sh -j `sysctl -n hw.ncpu` -D ../dest -O ../obj -T ../tools -R ../sets -m amiga tools kernel=MYKERNEL
6. Any tips to make the system more lightweight on the Amiga? I followed some tips from Karl Jeacle [1] like turning off makemandb and postfix and they really made difference.
makemandb doesn't really affect a running system except when it's running, but it's nice to have working man pages, so you might want to run that and let it finish when you're not doing other things on the system for a while (/etc/rc.d/makemandb onestart).
Not running postfix does save some memory, which helps.You might consider editing root's crontab to turn off the daily and weekly scripts, and only run those occasionally when you have nothing else planned for a while.
Thank you!
:) John