Subject: How I got macbsd going on a IIci
To: None <macbsd-general@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Paul Craig Tyler <paul@staff.cs.su.oz.au>
List: macbsd-general
Date: 03/28/1995 16:49:30
There seem to be a couple of questions about IIcis going on at the moment
so I thought I'd outline how I got netbsd going on a IIci. I've only just
joined the list so I hope this doesn't go over anything. I'll just outline
what I had trouble with.
I installed on a Syquest 88C drive, with a 16M swap, 8M mac partition
and rest was a /root & usr partition. The IIci has internal and
NuBus video, though I only had a monitor connected to the internal video.
The monitor however was a portrait A4 monitor, which caused problems with
dt.
The first thing to ensure is you get the netbsd.patched kernel. There
seem to be various versions of this all named the same at various sites.
I'm not certain whether these are the same or not. Try
ftp://cray-ymp.acm.stuorg.vt.edu/pub/NetBSD_Mac/1.0/binary/netbsd10.patched.
Also install base10, and etc10 from the same directory. The mrg kernel
doesn't work.
These were enough for me to boot into multi-user mode. (Ensure in MacOS
that you are in 32 bit mode and monitors are all in black and white.)
This kernel does have the ADB problem, that is the keyboard ceases working
when something happens on the bus during the screen scrolling. I've
installed dt which doesn't suffer this problem. I discuss below some problems
with installing dt.
For some reason which I haven't yet fathomed, the internal video
is /dev/grf1, and the Nubus video is /dev/grf0. This caused me lots of
troubles with dt. dt uses /dev/grf0 as the base monitor. However I didn't
have a monitor attached to that card and thought dt was hanging. Also the
routines for determining screen size within dt are not returning the correct
values for the portrait monitor. (Always returns 640x480.) Hardcoding the
size into dt has fixed this problem and adding an option for the default
device has solved the other. If anyone wants the diffs for this, let
me know. Make sure you are in 1 bit mode. If you get multiple small copies
of a screen, your monitor is in the wrong mode.
For those developers out there, I'm willing to help test out kernels or
code specific to the IIci. I'd like to thank those who have done work in
this area and made netbsd possible on my IIci.
Paul Tyler