Hi all-

I appreciate that this is not a supremely technical question but it is
nevertheless a critical component of installing NetBSD and I hope that
I will be able to get assistance from this group. Thanks in advance
for any help you can get me.

I have a Umax c600 on MacOS 8.5 that refuses to boot to Open Firmware 
in a way that permits me to boot into the sysinit installer. 

1) Rebooting and pressing OF option-command results in a blank screen
and no input. 

2) Working on the assumption that 1) I got into OF but 2) a serial
console is required, I attached a PowerBook Duo, ran Kermit in terminal
mode, set up the modem stats for 384000 8/N/1, booted the Umax and went
into OF. Nothing--the serial console doesn't work. I'd appreciate
someone telling me what I'm doing wrong here.

3) I am able to set bootvars to always going to OF and I consistently
get the blank screen/unresponsive monitor+keyboard/power on combination
that I am assuming is an open firmware prompt. I am not able to get
the SystemDisk to do the same thing. (Obviously, if I could, I might be
able to set OF to use the screen and the kbd.) Starting up, SystemDisk
complains that I do not have Mac OS X; attempts to save in the first
screen meet with failure. Save as file in advanced options produces a
file, but does not produce an effect when restarting. (The file is on the
desktop; if this is the problem, please let me know where it should
go.)

Many thanks, your help is much appreciated.

Ethan