Decided to try the latest boot floppy on my G3 266 desktop and got some
interesting results.

First thing I noticed was that I had a lot more problems getting the floppy
to "catch" and recognize that the kernel was there to boot up.  I got a lot
of "READ TIMEOUTopen fd/netbsd: Input/output error" messages from the various
attempts which didn't happen the first time I reported success in booting
the boot floppy.  I don't know if something got more sensitive in the NetBSD
boot, or my floppy disk is getting worn out  :-)

Anyway, my first boot was much as the previous run, only now of course the
MESH SCSI is recognized.  It saw my internal Zip drive!!!  Woo hoo!  So I
rebooted with an empty Zip disk in it, and damned if it didn't see that too.

I was able to run "sysinst" and get as far as disklabel'ing and newfs'ing the
Zip disk, when of course I suddenly realized I had no way of getting any of
the distribution sets from the August 8th snapshot onto the machine ... doh!

So, just for fun, I attached an old, old Apple CD150 (1x) CD-ROM drive to the
external SCSI bus.  Damned if the MESH driver didn't see that as "cd0", too!
(By now I'm getting really impressed  (-: )  Went through "sysinst" once
again just for fun, only this time I hit a glitch: a SCSI Error panic.  :-(

I then wondered if it was the addition of the CD-ROM to the bus that provoked
the panic.  I shut the machine off and booted up again.  This time I was
able to successfully complete the disklabel and newfs phases, and get into
the distribution extraction phase.  Just for fun I told it to check cd0 and
sure enough, the CD-ROM's amber light came on when it accessed a disk I shoved
in there just for testing.  Of course it didn't find the distribution sets, so
that's as far as I can go for now.  When I go back to work I'm going to burn
an ISO 9660 CD-R with the NetBSD/macppc distribution sets from August 8th
loaded in /macppc/binary/sets and see if I can get even further with it.

(One thing, however: the distribution sets take up 45 Mb, gzipped.  Even if
 I leave out 7.5 Mb of the games and the man pages, am I gonna have enough
 room to get the remaining 37+ Mb unzipped onto a Zip disk with ~ 80 Mb of
 usable space?  Maybe I should leave the "comp" stuff off until/unless I can
 get things working - or get a real disk to hang off the external SCSI bus.)

For completeness, here's the complete boot messages from my last attempt:

>> NetBSD/macppc OpenFirmware Boot, Revision 1.1
>> (tsubai@kanea, Mon Aug 17 00:21:21 JST 1998)
bad partition number, using 0open ide0/@0:6,mach_kernel/netbsd: Input/output \
error
Boot: netbsd
no active package READ TIMEOUTopen fd/netbsd: Input/output error

Boot:
READ TIMEOUTopen fd/netbsd: Input/output error
Boot: fd:0/netbsd
Booting fd/netbsd
2665964@0x100000+143560@0x38adec	[Screen switched to white-on-black now]
 start=0x1000000

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.3G (INSTALL) #0: Fri Aug 21 18:59:18 JST 1998
    tsubai@kanea:/c/0815/src/sys/arch/macpppc/compile/INSTALL
CPU: Version 8 (Revision 202)
real mem = 167772160
avail mem = 156672000
using 800 buffers containing 3276800 bytes of memory
mainbus0 (root)
cpu at mainbus0
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0
pci0: i/o enabled, memory enabled
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
pchb0: vendor 0x1057 product 0x0002 (rev. 0x40)
obio0 at pci0 dev 16 function 0: addr 0xf3000000
mesh at obio0 offset 0x10000 irq 12: MESH SCSI ID 7
scsibus0 at mesh0: 8 targets
cd0 at scsibus0 targ 3 lun 0: <SONY, CD-ROM CDU-8002, 1.8d> SCSI1 5/cdrom removable
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 5 lun 0: <IOMEGA, ZIP 100, J.03> SCSI2 0/direct removable
sd0: 96MB, 96 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 3 sectors
bmac at obio0 offset 0x11000 not configured
zsc0 at obio0 offset 0x13000: irq 15,16
zstty0 at zsc0 channel 0
zstty1 at zsc0 channel 1
davbus at obio0 offset 0x14000 not configured
swim3 at obio0 offset 0x15000 not configured
nvram0 at obio0 offset 0x60000
ide at obio0 offset 0x20000 not configured
ide at obio0 offset 0x21000 not configured
adb0 at obio0 offset 0x16000 irq 18
adb: extended keyboard at 2
adb: extended mouse <@200> 1-button 200 dpi mouse at 3
grfati0 at pci0 dev 18 function 0
grf0 at grfati0
ite0 at grf0
md0: internal 1536K image area
boot device: <unknown>
root on md0a dumps on md0b
WARNING: clock gained 15 days -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
root file system type: ffs
erase ^H, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C, status ^T
Terminal type? [sun] vt100 
Erase is backspace.
# 

(Why is the default terminal type "sun" when it should be "vt100"?  And why
 isn't Erase set to ^?/Delete, since that's what the Apple "delete" key sends?)

Here is the messages from when I got the panic:

Writing the NetBSD disklabel ...
Creating the new file systems on all 4.2BSD partitions...
/dev/rsd0a:	32768 sectors in 16 cylinders of 64 tracks, 32 sectors
	16.0MB in 1 cyl groups (16 c/g, 16.00MB/g, 39688 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32,
exec: mount_ffs /dev/sd0a /mnt
/dev/sd0a on /mnt type ffs (local)
/dev/rsd0g:	131072 sectors in 64 cylinders of 64 tracks, 32 sectors
	64.0MB in 4 cyl groups (16 c/g, 16.00MB/g, 3968 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32, 32382, 65632, 98432,
exec: mount_ffs /dev/sd0g /mnt/usr
/dev/sd0g on /mnt/usr type ffs (local)
Installing boot blocks on sd0....
Current offset 8192, s/g item offset 6608
panic: SCSI Error : DMA Offset Error
syncing disks.... 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 giving up

Anyway, this seems pretty encouraging and I feel like I'm getting a lot
closer to actually getting NetBSD fully installed and running on this machine,
which is a great bang-for-the-buck NetBSD box in my opinion (under $1500 now).

Much thanks to Tsubai and anyone else involved for their hard work in getting
it this far along, I am really impressed with the effort.  Viva NetBSD/macppc!

	- Greg