before I start I am using the i386 port of NetBSD-1.0
ON a 386/33 with 10 Megs o' RAM, 2 IDE drives 1 Floppy, a SIIG Multi I/O 
Board, a Trident 8900C SVGA Card, a USR Sportster 14.4 internal modem 
and/or a Hayes Smartmodem 9600 external. It uses AMI BIOS.


On Fri, 9 Jun 1995, Mike Long wrote:

> Are you running -current, or do you only have a -current source tree?

actually I have a 1.0 kernel and 1.0 source tree, sorry i forgot to 
mention that.

I may switch to current in a few weeks but right now i am tyring to 
convince the people i work for to use *nix rather than novell netware for 
a new dialin server i am building. I heard 1.0 was a bit more stable than 
current so i decided to screw around with 1.0 on my home machine.
So when it comes time to install on the server in the office i can 
(hopefully) blow through it without a hitch.

> cd /usr/src/share/mk; make install
> cd /usr/src/include; make install

did that.

> cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/config; make && make install

i was thwarted here yet again. This time make tells me it doesn't know 
how to build /usr/lib/crt0.o or some such. Nosing around of course turned 
it up in the bsd.prog.mk file. Once again i tried commenting that out 
just to see what would happen. I didn't really expect that to work, i was 
just hoping to give me a more verbose error somewhere down the line. 
Any idea as to where i should go from here?

I poked around looking for something that would build the object files it 
wanted but did not manage to turn anyhing up.
 
In the mean time i have just been mounting an empty floppy drive to dump 
enough crap to my screen to cure my screwed up console. It's ugly and 
annoying but it will do until i can recompile the kernel.

(thanks to Alistair G. Crooks for the work around)

Now my latest problem involves, despite following the instructions in the 
faq (to the bestof my knowledge) not being able to get either of my 
modems to work. One of which is an internal USR Sportster 14.4 and the 
other of which is an external Hayes Smartmodem 9600.

the USR is on com2 (dos COM3) irq 5
the hayes i plug into com1 (dos com2) irq 3

I ran MAKEDEV but it doesn't seem to want to make links to the ttys or 
make cua devices.

Now I've edited /etc/remote to run tip. And when attempting to connect to 
the port it either sits for a while and reports 'link down' or sits there 
in a hellish limbo from which i haven't managed to return sucessfully.

and yes i have used stty to have it ignore the carrier detect

Now I haven't managed to get the ports working on this machine even with 
0.9, I thought however that my problem was my ancient 8245 UART on my I/O 
board. It is of course now my new I/O board (with 16550a UART) that causes 
my current kernel difficulties. I did not know for sure if the 8245 was 
the problem but the docs said it wasn't supported and i couldn't get 
anyone to tell if if that would have been the problem or not.

I did at one time install 0.9 on a friends 486/50 the install went 
without a hitch and I had his external modem working in about 5-10 minutes.
Of course i can't remember what i *did* exactly, but it was along the 
lines of what the faq instructed me to do.

So I am beginning to believe i may just have evil hardware. Since no one 
else seems to have these problems, that or i am just exceedingly dense 
(which is entirely possible).

if spending a few bucks on a new motherboard would solve my problems 
could possibly solve my problems let me know.

One last thing, Is anyone currently planning/writing a NetBSD specific 
FAQ/Manual/helpful Document? My hat is off to the *BSD FAQ maintainer.
I'd certainly consider trying to assemble something of that nature if 
there is any interest. Clearly my NetBSD knowledge aint so hot, but i ask 
enough damn questions that i will eventually ask them all and i could 
assemble them all together. I'm not sure i'd have the time to do this 
right now, but please let me know if there is any interest/desire etc...



anyway, sorry to be a pain in the ass, yet again
if you made it this far thanks and thanks in advance for any help.


aron roberts
aron@c2.org