On Mon, 3 Mar 1997, Bob Nestor wrote:

> The 550 didn't come with an FPU but it does have a slot for one. NetBSD 
> does perform a lot better with an FPU.  Have you installed one in your 
> system?  If you have did you make sure to get the right one?  The LC-520 
> uses a 25Mhz 68030, but the 550 uses a 33Mhz CPU.  I believe you really 
> want a 33Mhz 68882 FPU, but most of the ones on the market today are at 
> most 25Mhz.

My machine is pretty much "out of the box" hardware-wise except for a
memory upgrade to 12MB total.  I was hoping to avoid spending any money to
get NetBSD going, viewing it as a sort of "grand experiment".  But I've
skimmed my Mac magazines & catalogs and may inquire about the price of an
FPU (and I've seen mention in at least one ad of a 33Mhz 68882). 

> Which disk drive are you using for NetBSD?  The original disk was a 160 
> Meg Quantum with Apple ROMS, but it suffers some with the standard SCSI 
> driver in NetBSD.  The same disks were used in the LC-II and LC-III and 
> NetBSD users of these systems have reported much better success with the 
> SBC SCSI driver.

Well, again I was looking at this project as an experiment, and as such I
wasn't quite ready to surrender my MacOS hard drive to repartioning.  I've
installed all things-BSD on an appropriately partitioned and formatted Zip
disk (this is probably part of the problem [?]). 

In fact, after I sent the original message to the port-macBSD list, things
went downhill fairly fast, and I've come to the conclusion that, whatever
other problems aside, my file system became corrupted somehow (again,
probably due in part to the Zip itself). 

I'm happy to hear that someone has gotten NetBSD to run on a 550; it
encourages me to keep trying.  If nothing else, I will keep all the NetBSD
files and try again sometime when the 550 isn't also my primary MacOS
machine.  I'm still very interested in getting NetBSD to run on this
machine, so if you have any more recommendations I'd be glad to read them. 


Thanks for your help,

	Jeffrey Ohlmann