subject: making boot floppy for sparc on a PC, and installing

Hi.  It's been a while since I did an install on the sparc, but
from what I remember, the instructions implied that one could
create a sparc boot floppy by rawriting the boot image on a PC
running DOS.

I tried this, and couldn't get the sparc to boot off the floppy.
I didn't really expect it to.  I installed solaris, and did the
'dd' procedure to create the boot floppy, which worked.

Now, if creating a sparc boot floppy on a PC with rawrite works,
then all is well and I can stop typing and you can stop reading.
My setup may have failed due to hardware problems, bad floppies,
etc.

However, if it actually is impossible to create a sparc boot
floppy from DOS, then I have a suggestion.  First, it would be
REALLY nice to be able to, since people doing a first time
install by definition do not have another system lying around
to create UNIX style floppies.  Second, installing solaris
just to create a floppy is a pain and may be impossible for
some people.

The solution is simple.  There is an old DOS utility on simtel
called teledisk.exe which takes a floppy of non-dos origin (mac,
sun, etc. etc.) and creates an image of it which is stored as a
DOS file.  This file can be archived on the netbsd site along with
the boot image for dd'ing.  First time installers would download
the teledisk image of the sun boot floppy to a readily available
DOS machine, run teledisk.exe to create the sparc boot floppy,
then proceed with the installation on the sparc.

SIMPLE!  I'm all for making things as simple as possible for
first-time users.

What do others think?  Are there other solutions?  I really think
that bootstrapping first-time users off existing commonly available
DOS machines is the way to go!  Expecting them to be able to do a dd,
set up a tftpd server, rarpd server, bootparamd server, etc, etc,
for a netboot can be a total failure!