Here at work, a number of folks are getting machines up using Linux. I've
been involved in NetBSD on the mac68k port, and want to show us off too.
Unfortunately we have no spare macs. We do have a spare 486, though, so
I'd like to get NetBSD up on it. Since I'm new to PC's in general I'm
looking for some suggestions.

The machine's a 486 DX 33 (soon to be replaced w/ a clock-doubling DX66)
with 16 MB RAM and an EISA motherboard.

I have a 120 MB IDE drive on the motherboard's controller, which is set to
be the primary controller. I need to keep a dos partition on here (to hold
the software which justifies stealing our last VGA card), and am wondering
if I can get booting started off of a ~40 MB drive.

There is also a Distributed Processing Technology (dpt) SCSI controller
card on the ISA bus. I have it set to be the secondary controller, and it
has a 120 MB drive on it. It will soon be gaining another 80 MB. I also
have an Asante Ethernet card (NE-2000 compatable supposedly), a Paradise
VGA card, and a serial port card that has 8 Ns16C450 serial chips on it.

So all this should work, no? I expect the VGA and the Ethernet cards are
"standard," so they should be fine. It'd be nice to get the extra serial
ports working, but COM1 to COM4 will be more than enough (are COM5 to COM8
"standard"?).

I see two ways to deal with the SCSI controller. 1) do we have a dpt
driver? They have source for a BSDi driver, which I could probably
eventually port, but.. there are other things I'd rather work on. 2) It
supposedly can fake two of the SCSI drives up as drives on a WD1003
controller, which looks like an IDE controller. If I have 2 IDE
controllers, one drive on the first, NetBSD will find two drives on the
second, won't it?

Given that the second "IDE" will have most of NetBSD, how much has to be
on the fist drive to get everything to boot? Also, how do I set it up for
dual boot?

Is there a FAQ or website for i386 info? I looked on www.netbsd.org, but
didn't see a reference.

Thanks!

Bill