Hi,

I sup'ed yesterday and got the 1.3 branch. It is probably the first time,
ever, that a make build completed without human intervention! It was really
encouraged. 1.3 works flawlessly on my own machine (Dell P-II 266). 

I got a new machine to set up here, and thought that I should give the
new sysinst a try. It was a brand new Dell Optiplex GXi Pentium Pro 233.
The floppy booted fine, and I got the install menu. Looks fine so far - 
until I hit a key on the keyboard. No response! Another boot - still 
no contact with the keyboard. Hmm. Then I tried my own machine, which 
btw. works fine with sup'ed sources and a custom kernel. Still the same -
no contact with the keyboard. Strange, the only explanation I could think
of was that something must have gone wrong during all the probing of the
generic kernel (but nothing weird on console output). 

I experimented a little bit more, and found that the keyboard did indeed
work fine about every sixth boot of the floopy! Well, I could eventually
try out the sysinst program. Looks promising, but has potential for
improvements. As other has noted, I don't like the semantic of using
the label 'exit' to go back in the menu hierarchy. I would expect the
program to really exit! It would also be nice if it could list all
media types that an interface is capable of - instead of relying on me
remembering the syntax. (It may be described in the install notes, which
I have _not_ read (well, I did back in 1.0)). Some error messages did
clobber the screen, and was never removed! The text was mixed with the
menu contents, and it was getting hard to read what was going on. Maybe
some clearing of the screen from time to time would be nice. 

Well, it was time to format the disk. I didn't expect any problems here
since I was going to use the whole disk. The bios reported geometry and
NetBSD's view of the disk was not the same, as expected. Then sysinst told
me that NetBSD's view didn't make use of the whole disk. At this point,
it would be nice if it also could calculate how much was left. I had to 
use a calculator and found that it was only 7 MB. Well, I wanted to try 
out sysinst, and told it to give me some alternatives. It did - and was
actually impressed with that. I found a geometry setting that left only
a single sector. I naturally tried to use that. The rest of this part
went without errors.

Now to the actual downloading. I wanted to try ftp, and it went on and
downloaded a lot of sets. And after doing that, it asked me which sets
that I wanted installed!!!! I didn't want all sets installed, but they
were all downloaded already! What a waste of bandwith (and time). 

The rest of the install went fine, and it asked me if the given network
setting was correct. Well, I thought it was, and answered yes. Ok, time
to reboot. Bios reported "No operating system"! What had gone wrong - 
didn't sysinst run installboot....? Yes, it did, I saw the output. After
seven tries with the boot floppy, I got contact with the keyboard again.
The disklabel looked fine, and tried to run installboot again. No errors,
and everything should work. But it didn't. I was unable to get the damn
thing to boot (and I was getting tired of booting the floppy six times
before the keyboard responded). I decided to do the whole install once 
more, but this time I used the real geometry of the disk - as reported
by NetBSD (and wasted 7 MB's).

I wanted to try the NFS install, and I downloaded all sets down
to my own machine. Unfortunately, I did not have NFS in my kernel. So,
sysinst was unsuccessful in mounting my disk (naturally). However, it
never gave the control back to the menus. It kept trying, and
continued after I booted a new kernel. The install went fine,
and it was actually able to boot this time. But it didn't came long 
before it panic'ed setting the interrupt on the audio card. The SB driver
had earlier attached itself successfully, and now the wss driver was
trying to do the same. Oh well, a custom kernel was required (and I'm 
glad that I have a running system on my own computer). After booting
some times with the floppy, I installed my newly compiled kernel - 
without any audio drivers. I really expected things to work fine now.

It booted, and it was time to configure rc.conf. I was asked which terminal
type I had, and I knew it was pc3, but not everyone knows that. Maybe it
is described in the install notes... Since the keyboard worked, I 
was able to configure rc.conf. 

Another reboot, and it gave me the login prompt. No keyboard response....
I was really getting frustrated at this point. Almost the same kernel
works fine with my machine. It eventually came with 'pc: timeout 
updating leds', and I was not surprised by that. What was worse, the
network didn't work. It tried to ifconfig the wrong interface... The
kernel on the install floppy recognized my two network cards as ep1 and
ep2. I had to use ep1 from sysinst. Well, my customized kernel recognized
these two cards as ep0 and ep1! I was able to fix this after another
six boots of the floppy (I was unable to get keyboard response booting
the kernel on the disk, and I didn't want to corrupt the filesystem 
more than necessary).

Another boot, and the network came up fine (well, it answers a ping).
Still no response from the keyboard. No problem, I thought, I can
remotely log in, and try to tweak some timimg variables in the keyboard
driver. However, inetd refuses to work correctly. It came with this
message on the console: "pmap_set: 100001 1 17 1025: Address already
in use" (several similar messages).

Oh well, so I am unable to remotely log in, and the keyboard doesn't
work. So much for a stable 1.3....

I wonder what the next chapter in this story will reveal...

A frustrated
- Geir Inge.