On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:57:09 +0100, Michael Holzt <kju@fqdn.org> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> you now have the opportunity to show a debian/gnu linux developer the power
> of netbsd :-) But seriously: I'm trying to get some sort of unix/linux
> running on a Cobalt Qube1 (Model 2700WG). This is tricky on a machine
> without a serial console, and all my tries with linux failed. Therefore i
> decided to tryout NetBSD. I found the rescue cd, downloaded and burned it
> and then bootet from it.
> 
> But it does not seem to work either: The Qube does netbook the NetBSD Kernel
> and after that the link led of the network adapter starts blinking in a very
> slow speed (say 3 seconds on and 10 seconds off or somethink like this) but
> nothing else happens.
> 
> Any idea what i could do? I really would like to give NetBSD a chance.

Debian is about the only Linux I can stomach. All the rest are too
disorganized. Good job to the Debian people for making a seamless and
easy to deal with OS (other than install but I think that's coming
along too).

That particular Qube is a little tough because there's no way to know
what's going on other than tcpdump. I've personally never watched a
netboot process via tcpdump so I don't know what to look for. But it
might be useful to see what the last thing that happened was... Might
also be worth seeing if the server machine is doing what it needs to
do as well.

It might be worth setting up a boot server machine to see if that
works. If you try to netboot a complete distro from a boot server and
it still doesn't work, at least you'll know more than you did before.
I don't remember what the Qube uses to netboot, but I'm sure it's
explained somehow in the diskess(8) page. That's the easiest way to
get an otherwise grumpy box to do something in my experience.

Andy