It turns out that it was one of those adapters that go on the
modem port of G3/G4 machines that I read about, not a USB-serial adapter.
My next plan was this: build an NFS root that enabled telnetd, and netboot
it (by blindly typing boot enet into OF) but in the end that wasn't
necessary. When I turned on the machine to get the MAC address I noticed
that the bottom few lines of the screen were readable.
	I was able to partition the disk in macos by navigating with the
keyboard and dragging Drive Setup to the bottom of the screen (is there
any way to partition from inside netbsd? disklabel kept complaining about
a bad magic number / checksum, and wouldn't write the label). I then did a
manual install using the shell in the bottom rows of the screen.
	Not as exciting as a serial install but I'm happy with the new
usability of this screenless laptop. Much snappier than my DEC 3000 :-)

Gregory

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Gregory Smith wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
> > At 9:41 AM -0500 12/10/01, Gregory Smith wrote:
> > >	I have a rev. a ibook on which the screen has died (completely).
> > >The machine's got a pretty good processor in it compared to what I
> > >normally use (an old alpha), and I'd like to try to get NetBSD working on
> > >it. Here are the problems:
> > >1) no serial ports
> > >2) how to force OF to serial console, and
> > >3) how to force netbsd to serial console
> > >
> > >	I read on this list a long time ago that someone was able to get a
> > >serial console on a USB-only machine like this iBook using a USB-serial
> > >adapter, so I may be able to get past 1 and 2, and I'm sure 3 is just a
> > >matter of passing in the correct arguments to the kernel, or at very
> > >worst, compiling one specially for serial console (which I could
> > >cross-compile, yuck).
> > >	Any experiences or useful information on this matter would be
> > >appreciated, I'm hesitant to buy a serial adapter unless I have a good
> > >chance of getting it working. Thanks