> > 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!
> 
> This is indeed an annoying problem, it has been reported by other people.
> Unfortunately, we did not hear about this until very close to the 1.3
> release, and it was too late to fix it. I would love to fix this
> problem, if there are people out there with Dell machines that
> want to help debug, let me know.

I can certainly help debug this problem. But it's strange that my ordinary
desktop Dell PC never had this problem. But with the 1.3 boot floppy
in it, the keyboard was totally lost... I use pccons on this too.

Since it some times works, it am wondering if it is a timing related 
problem. Maybe if I counted further than 100000 in pccons.c?

Now I have to find out how to make a boot floppy with a custom kernel :)

> > 
> > Bios reported "No operating system"! What had gone wrong - 
> 
> I'm not sure what's going on here. Apparently your (SCSI) BIOS
> does not like the geometry used to create the MBR.

Yes indeed. It is a SCSI :)

> > 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).
> 
> There appears to be a conflict between running rpc.statd from inetd
> and running it as a daemon. Try switching off rpc.statd in rc.conf
> (and perhaps others). I've never seen this happen using the default
> setup with installs (and I tried several).

Well, If I can get control of it :) Seriously, I will investigate this
matter as soon as I have a working keyboard. Don't forget the panic with
the installed kernel. Not everyone has other machines to feed them with
new kernels...

If I were a new potential NetBSD user, I would probably have long gone to
alternatives by now. I haven't tried FreeBSD yet, but OpenBSD worked fine,
and I'll bet Linux will too. This is the behaviour I expect from current
(which I do track).


- Geir Inge.