At 2:26 PM -0700 10/26/00, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

:)It's really nice to see someone trying to organize all this
:)information.  Many mucho thanks!!!!!!!

Yeah, I just got sick of the current status of lousy documentation.  That
and the better the docs are, the more people will use NetBSD/macppc, and
the more likely we'll get developers working on it.  Currently, it seems
like over half the posts on this group are people trying to get it
installed.

:)What follows are nits.  As Bob Nestor says we need to have a simple
:)set of instructions that will *work* before we can start exploring
:)all the special cases.

Unfortunately, after trying that, I found that OF has more exceptions than
rules (kinda like the English language).  Instead, I broke it down into
instructions for each different classes of OF (1.0.5 and 2.0.x, 1.1.22,
2.4, and 3) as within each class, most everything is the same.

:)I wouldn't be too sure this is true.  I know you can boot from a
:)plain ISO CD-ROM with some caveats like type the filename in caps and
:)such.

OK, good.  I've had two people tell me that they can't even get their OF
2.0.1 PowerBooks to boot a pure ISO CD.  I've had no problems with a
Toast-created ISO CD on my OF 1.0.5 machine.

:)I would suspect that you can boot from hybrid CD-ROM's if you just
:)can figure out exactly what magic bits to set where.  Since we don't
:)know what those bits are and since neither mkhybrid nor Toast set
:)them properly we can't claim we support that capability if it does
:)exist.

Unfortunately, you *must* have a hybrid CD to boot an OF 3 machine.  Which
means we can't have just one CD image to work on all macppcs.

Personally, I'm leaning towards distributing a hybrid CD with the boot
floppy image and the MacOS tool to write that to disk.  That way, they've
got a boot floppy and a CD with the dist sets, and OF 3 people can just
boot it.

:)The fact that you can boot from a MacOS OS CD proves that ISO
:)is not the only CD-ROM option on these machines.

Not necessarily, since those models (pre OF 3) load the MacOS ROM first
before trying to boot from CD.

:)My own experience is that the machine was fine without System Disk
:)and wouldn't boot properly after I ran it.

Idunno, considering the number of models that are completely broken until
System Disk patches them, I'd rather encourage use of it.  Then, if there
are problems, they can just disable use-nvramrc?.  At least that way,
System Disk figures out the screen device, sets up load-base, and has a
non-threatening GUI.

Any other info/suggestions?

  -- MW