Re: NetBSD/amiga sysinst (Was: Video of NetBSD/amiga 10.0_BETA network install in real Amiga 1200)

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2023 at 23:53, Carlos Milán Figueredo
<cmilanf%hispamsx.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> From: Daniel Doran <danielktdoranie%icloud.com@localhost>
> Sent: domingo, 26 de febrero de 2023 17:39
>
> > Even better yet… a hard drive image file hosted on Google Drive
> > so one could just image their own hard drive with it ;-)
>
> I already built some time ago a clean image of a NetBSD 9.2 default install using WinUAE [1] (the README is wrong in the X11R7 support for ECS and AGA, I sent an update to correct it), you can try it. Even so, I think the usefulness of that approach is very limited and mostly targeted at trying in emulators.

Ah nice!. Sounds like a netbsd-10_BETA version might be good for
others to try. Given I _cannot_ resist the compulsion to try to make
helpful suggestions for anything :)
ROOT. can be used as a device prefix in fstab to automatically refer
to the boot device, whether IDE, SCSI or similar, to avoid needing to
encode the boot device directly - e.g.:

ROOT.a          /               ffs     rw,log 1 1
ROOT.b          none            swap    sw,dp

> The point in making the video capture of the full install process is to help people to do the install themselves with their own disk layout. Each user has different disk sizes, different OSes, different preferences for the partitioning... it is a very personal thing I do not think it should be defined by someone else.

I feel it's akin to live USB bootable images - it provides the easiest
and quickest way for someone to try NetBSD. For some people writing
that image to a disk and booting it is a reasonably high end technical
task, while for others it's trivial. Either way it gives a quick
gateway into something that works and can be used as is, or played
with until they install something specific. Bonus marks if the
bootable image also has a fully working installer which can install
onto another disk (which could be just sysinst :)

It looks like there may be a few areas which could make it easier for
new users to NetBSD/amiga, some of which might include:

- Adding sysinst to the miniroot
- Working out why AmigaOS 3.2 kickstart ROM will not boot NetBSD boot blocks
- Simplifying the boot process (fewer arguments needed, maybe reading
defaults from a file)
- Getting a good set of useful binary packages available
- Improving install notes
- Providing easy test disk images (I think your aminet upload covers this)

David