At 9:43 PM +0200 10/3/00, you wrote:

:)I was now hoping to be able to install to the disk via FTP using
:)sysinst, but it doesn't seem too be installed with the base sets, and
:)I haven't been able to find a binary on the FTP site. I guess I could
:)extract sysint from the floppy image, but don't know what type of
:)filesystem that uses (nor even whether I have a machine which can
:)mount it).
:)
:)Please help!

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do.  As to utilities, you
just needed to look a little further:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/macppc/isofs.20000620-1.5
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/macppc/snapshot/20000620-1.5/installation/n
etbsd.ram.gz

The former is a bootable CD-ROM image (which has worked for some people,
but not all), and the latter is a kernel which you can use to boot your
machine.  This kernel should contain all of the installation tools you need.

:)PS: the kernel goes into reverse video halfway through the boot, after
:)which the screen becomes pretty much unreadable on the powerbook. Is
:)it possible to disable that?

It shouldn't be unreadable.  AFAIK, to disable it, you need to compile a
new kernel.  This is something called a "raster console" which uses
graphics (akin to X11) to draw the console text, as opposed to using the
Open Firmware text drawing tools.

  -- MW