At the moment the 0220 boot disk (mainly sysinst) seems unable to do just 
about anything properly, at least on my PowerBook G3 Series.  I have already 
made the extra ttys, so that is not the problem (unless it needs more than the 
3 ttyp's and ptyp's I saw mentioned here).  macppc is the only port I have 
ever tried sysinst on, so I am not sure how many of these are specific to 
macppc, and how many are bugs with it on every platform.

	First off, minor gripe, but if you set your own partitions and just specify 
that the entire disk go to /, it still asks about swap and /usr, /usr properly 
detects that there is no space left and defaults to 0, but swap offers a 
default value that simply won't work since the drive is already fully 
allocated.  And even after setting 0 for both, it STILL creates b and g 
partitions, size 0, but with an offset past the end of the disk.  I am not 
sure if this would cause problems later on as I always immediately trimmed 
these values.  It also puts sd0b in the fstab it generates, even though I gave 
the size as 0 and set the partition to unused.  It did not put an entry for 
sd0g in the fstab.  It also seems there should be an option to just keep the 
current partition scheme.  sysinst seems to force you to redo the disklabel 
every time, which sucks because I have to keep correcting sysinst's mistakes 
when I already have a disktab that is exactly what I want.

	Next, if I request a custom installation, I noticed that both "X contrib 
clients" AND "X11 servers" toggle the "X11 servers" value in the list.  In 
fact if I hit enter on both X11 servers and X contrib clients, the X11 servers 
option goes from Yes to No, then BACK to Yes.  So even though (I think) I have 
deselected both X contrib clients and X11 servers, both read Yes in the list.  
Similarly, "X11 programming" toggles the option labelled "X11 contrib".  So 
either you can't completely deselect X because of this (which is what I wanted 
to do), or you can and the list simply isn't displayed properly.  Very 
confusing.

	Getting past this point (not sure exactly what I am installing now), I select 
the ftp install and start to configure my bm0 network interface.  I enter all 
of the information (and I know it's right, it's exactly what works for this 
machine in MacOS, and works for my other systems in NetBSD), and once I enter 
everything it does a ping that fails with "No route to host".  I have 
backgrounded this while it is running and poked around, and bm0 wasn't even 
ifconfig'ed!  route show shows that there is no default route, either.

	So I give up on sysinst and ifconfig bm0 / route add manually.  It comes up 
just fine.  I can ping by IP, but not by hostname.  Yet the /etc/resolv.conf 
it created is perfect.  This is one part I simply can't get to work.  I 
thought that first it might be the lack of an /etc/nsswitch.conf.  But if I 
create an /etc/hosts and throw in a few of my machines (without creating 
nsswitch) I can ping those machines by name, but still nothing else.  I know 
my nameserver is working just fine.

	So deciding to just ftp by ftp.netbsd.org's IP address, I connect, cd to the 
0119 snapshot directory, and try to grab the .tgz files.  I say "try" because 
ftp hangs, and does not even respond to ^C.  I can background it, but that is 
about it.

	At this point I just gave up completely.  But I figured I should point out 
these problems to somebody.  Any tips / suggestions / workarounds would be 
greatly appreciated.  I had assumed that sysinst was supposed to make 
installation easy, but this has definitely proved otherwise.  Unfortunately I 
can't even do a manual install off this disk, it seems to be really broken.

	Thanks in advance.


                                                          Will Ferry

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woferry@iname.com