Subject: Re: HELP ON 1.3 BOOT
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
From: Dave Huang <khym@bga.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 11/22/1997 13:59:32
On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> I think one of the problems is that the mac68k port isn't using the new
> sysinst utility. I'm not complaining, seeing as I don't have time to get
> it working for us :-) , but a lot of other ports have a different method
> of installing, and on them you don't just boot to the system bare-bones.

It might be too close to the release to get something like this working,
but what about something similar to the old i386 installation? Like around
NetBSD 0.9 or so (or maybe even 1.0 was like this, I don't remember :)
Back whenever that was, NetBSD relied on the user partitioning the
drive from DOS or something, and used mtools to copy stuff off of a MSDOS
filesystem onto NetBSD. Maybe we could make a kernel with a built-in
miniroot that had stuff like hfsutils, newfs, tar, rm, ls, those other
utilities that are good to have during installation, etc... and have a
little install script that'd set most of the stuff up?

Seems like the main obstacle to doing an install from within NetBSD is the
lack of HFS support, but it should be okay to include hfsutils, right?
(Isn't it GPL'd? NetBSD includes GPL'd stuff when it has to :) As long as
it's not in the kernel...)
--
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