Hello all,

I'd like to express my thanks to Tsubai and the other people making NetBSD/macppc
happen.

Very recently, they have enabled me to install a NetBSD/macppc system on my PowerMac
G3 DT 233 machine on an external SCSI disk (using the not-yet-integrated) mesh driver
from the nandra ftp server. The final addition that made it useful was the addition
of the bmac ethernetdriver needed for my G3.

Even X is working, and I'm writing this message in an xterm window on the PowerMac
machine.

I have installed binutils 2.9.1 with Todd Vierlings patches (as discussed on
tech-toolchain@netbsd.org), and with this set-up, I have made a complete rebuild
of NetBSD up to sources as of yesterday.

One funny thing: yesterdays change of direction of the Y axis in ams.c made the mouse
pointer go the wrong way vertically, while moving correctly horizontally in X -- maybe
this requires another fix, or maybe it will be corrected by a recompilation of X.

Other results: perl5.005_03-MAINT_TRIAL_3.tar.gz (released a couple of days ago)
installs cleanly on NetBSD/macppc and passes all tests. No previous version worked.

Emacs also seems to be working with the patch supplied on nandra.

My remaining main problem is that since installing a root disk image a long time ago,
I have not been able to make another disk bootable, even after playing a lot
with installboot and discussing it on this mailing list a while ago. I'm really
at my wits end in this question, and I start wondering whether or not it is a
problem with the mesh driver ? Installboot seems to install the new boot blocks
indicating the block numbers when called with -v, and I have also been careful
to sync before and after calling installboot, but still I cannot get it to boot.
Maybe it is time to do some serious debugging here (by the way, what characterises
a bootable disk/partition ?).

regards
- Erik Bertelsen