Am Samstag, 01. Februar 2003 um 11:29:36 Uhr (-0500) schrieb Jeff Bolle:

> I would suspect your network card first. I have a card that I know is ne2000
> compatible but doesn't work on the z50 for whatever reason.  I believe the

Hi,

just to give some feedback: Indeed the root of my trouble was the
NE2000-compatible Level One PFC-0105TX 10/100 Mbit PCMCIA NIC I used. To
my surprise, it didn't even recognize a Xircom CreditCard Ethernet IIPS
and a Xircom CreditCard Ethernet 10/100 Upgradable, but eventually
worked with a 3com Etherlink III PCMCIA card. (Should I file the Xircom
incompatibilities as bugs? All the above cards worked fine under Linux.)

Even with this problem ironed out, I am still struggling with getting
the z50 to run (and feel like a reborn newbie). Interesting observations
made in the process:

- trouble with PCMCIA NICs (see above)

- sysinst forgets to umount /mnt and /mnt/usr when it
  aborts at certain stages, thus resulting in failing attempts to label
  and partition the disk upon resume

- systinst doesn't observe available disk size when choosing install sets,
  so I ended up with "disk full" errors during install three times.

- systinst forgets domain name, gateway and DNS entries for ftp/nfs
  retrieval upon resume, but remembers the other network parameters

- when picking the FTP source, sysinst offers no default values for
  mirrors, and it doesn't allow to edit the default values (but forces
  to retype server name and source directory from scratch)

- when an FTP installation fails (because of a typo in the source
  directory value, for example), the "Try again" message is ambiguous;
  it should rather be "Try again with corrected parameters" or something
  similar.

Now I am still stuck with the partition layout as regards to the size of
the installation. I use a 256 MB CF card with a 19 MB DOS partition for
pbsdboot.exe and the kernel image and 226 MB remaining for NetBSD. 

The "default without X" layout implies to allocate 117 MB for /, 97 MB
for swap and only 11 MB for /usr, which doesn't sound very sane to me.
My initial idea was to do without swap and a separate /usr partition,
but install NetBSD on just one logical partition. - It seems that this
doesn't work; upon reboot, the z50 user kernel from ftp.netbsd.org
complained that it couldn't access the CF disk partition and ended up in
an endless loop.

Which partition layout would you recommend for such a setup?

-F


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