On Sun, 8 Sep 1996, Gregory S. Burd wrote:
> I acquired a sun sparc-2 clone with a 100meg hard drive and 16meg RAM.

Congratualtions on your new Sparc. You'll probably find it an enjoyable
machine; I use a Sparcstation 1 at home as my primary machine.

> I know that I will get a larger hard drive, but I am
> not sure how big and what type.  I know what a struggle it is to setup
> drives on a sun machine and I don't want to get a drive that is really
> problematic.

That drive will be just barely big enough to put a NetBSD system
on. So yes, you will have to get a larger one. I have a 500MB
Quantum Lightning on my machine, and I just added a 1GB Iomega Jaz
drive. (The latter is so I'll be able to back up the original drive
and also so I've got room for a full source tree and compilation
thereof.) I've also used an old Fujitsu 130MB drive on it. I've
not found adding drives to my machine to be at all problematic;
every one I've used has worked right out of the box. I should think
you can go out and buy whatever you feel comfortable with in terms
of SCSI drives.

You will probably want to add more memory, too; my Sparc running X uses
about 16MB of RAM right there, so before I upgraded to 28MB, pretty much
anything I ran started the machine swapping.

> QUESTION: What media should I use to build this machine NetBSD-sparc?

If you can find a place to do it, I think the easiest way is to
take it into a place with other Unix machines on a network, netboot
it, and do the install that way. That's how I do mine, so unfortunately
I can't give you any advice beyond that.

> QUESTION: What verison of NetBSD-sparc should I use?

I'd go with -current. It's quite stable now that it's the 1.2 beta
release.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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