>From: Julian Coleman <J.D.Coleman@newcastle.ac.uk>
>
>First, apologies if this message is a little long.

I'll reply to what bits I can...I'm sure Leo or someone else with a
clue will address the rest.

>Is it worth me looking at the install scripts?  Or are you planning
>to move to 'sysinst' at some  point?

I believe the plan is that all systems will move to sysinst.

>I ran installboot, but (of course) I couldn't reboot into NetBSD, as I
>caught the same 'panic: Bus error' that entropy caught.  So I reset

I can verify that this has been corrected, and working bootblocks (and
loadbsd) will be in the 1.3 release.

>One oddity is that the floppy light stays on (from the 'scsicbus0 at ...'
>line on bootup) until floppy is inserted.  Also I notice :
>
>	fd0 at fdc0: 720KB 80 cyl, 2 head, 9 sec
>
>even though I have a 1.4M floppy.  1.4M floppys seem to work if I mount
>them with :

That is normal.  The drives in the Atari don't support hardware
detection of the density, so the driver assumes it is a 720K drive by
default.  The actual density selection used depends on the minor
device used, as documented in "man 4 floppy".

>	mount -t msdos -o -G /dev/fd0c /mnt
>
>or similar (aka. the man page).  I couldn't find the documentation for the
>'-G' flag in the mount_msdos man page.  Wouldn't that be nicer if it were
>'-o gemdos'?

The '-G' flag is documented in mount_msdos, and has been for quite a
long time.  Maybe you just missed it?  I'm not sure why you'd rather
type out 'gemdos' than just '-G'.  I suspect the choice to use a flag
rather than an option is because options are supposed to be
generically applicable to more than one filesystem type.

>Now all I need is a device driver and X server for my Crazy Dots II card.
>How difficult would it be to write a driver (bearing in mind I have no
>docs and no driver writing experience!)?  There is already an XF86 X
>server for the ET4000 and the Hades port has a PCI driver, so presumably,
>I can use those as a base?  Hmm, and a minixfs driver! :-)

I don't know anything about the Crazy Dots II.  Is this a VME-bus
card?  Do you have any hardware documentation on it?  I may be able to
help out a little bit.

It looks like you have seen my earlier message about my
hopefully-soon-to-be-completed driver for my
hopefully-soon-to-be-delivered VMEbus LANCE ethernet card.  After
that's done and out of the way, I plan to start working on either a
minixfs driver, or on ACSI support.  I haven't decided yet which I
want to do first, but right now I think it'll probably be minixfs.  I
don't want to promise too much vaporware though, so pretend I didn't
say anything :-)

>PS.  Presuambly I should just grab the -current source if I want to compile
>my own kernel?  I have a Cabletron EA412 SCSI<->ethernet adapter and I'd
>quite like to try it out (I'd prefer one of those VME cards, but I think
>I'd like to use the graphics card more.  And $1000 is a little steep!).

You lucky &%$##!  I went crazy looking for one of those Cabletron
gadgets earlier this year.

You will definitely need to compile your own kernel to add support for
the Cabletron.  I'm not sure how easy it'll be to make it work though.
At the very least you will need to add a line to your kernel config to
probe the device, like this:

se*	at	scsibus? target ? lun ?

Another networking option that looks interesting to me is
point-to-point IP over SCSI between two hosts (see RFC 2143).  This
would eliminate the need for any costly or hard-to-find devices to get
excellent networking performance out of the Atari.  All you would need
is another NetBSD machine, with both a SCSI card and ethernet card.  I
looked at this a bit before I bought myself my expensive Christmas
present, but decided it would require a real guru to implement.  Any
takers? :-)

Cheers,
entropy

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.