> So now, I remain looking forward to the results of your test with X.
>
There seems to be some corruped sets in the cd image from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sgimips/snapshot/bootable-cd-3.99.3

# tar -xvzpf /mnt/sgimips/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
[snip]
gzip: failed to read stdin: Bad address

tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
tar: ustar vol 1, 2926 files, 21026975 bytes read, 0 bytes written in 254 
secs )
./usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/lubB14-ISO8859-14.pcf.gztar: Unexpected EOF on
(* I missed the rest of the message *)

# tar -xvzpf /mnt/sgimips/binary/sets/xserver.tgz
gzip: can't read stdin: Bad address
tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
tar: Unexpected EOF on archive file
tar: Sorry, unable to determine archive format.

My md5 sum is correct and I burnt the cd twice just in case.

I installed successfully these two sets from the image at 
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/2.0
but couldn't run X (it is probably expected as I extracted 2.0
sets on a -current system).
Because of all those green messages I'm unable to see where
the error comes from when starting X.

Any suggestion?

Regards,
Thierry.