Hi,

I recently installed the 22 Jan snapshot of NetBSD/alpha on an
AlphaStation 200 model 4/100 (yep, it's a dog ;-).

Here are some notes from my experiences with the installation.
This is the first time I've installed an Alpha machine, but I
have NetBSD experience from i386, hp300, sparc and vax.

1) A kernel image containing the install tools should be a little
   more accessible, or it should be documented how you can get at
   the appropriate image.  I think I needed that kernel in order to
   be able to netboot the installation image.  Luckily, I knew that
   the "cdhdtape" image contained a tar image somewhere in there,
   and after a little fiddling I found

	% dd if=cdhdtape of=netbsd.tar skip=16
	% tar xvf netbsd.tar netbsd
	% mv netbsd netbsd.gz (can probably be skipped)

2) After some fiddling with the bootptab entries ("hn" could
   apparently not contain the '.' character -- ugh!), the kernel
   booted fine.  (I just removed the 'hn' entry, as it didn't appear
   to be required.)

3) The sysinst program from the Jan 22 snapshot is the new one
   where output from the individual commands are collected and shown
   in a "window" (I installed from a serial console).  When it came
   time to fetch the distribution via ftp, the ftp command failed.
   It appeared that an "extra" single quote character appeared in
   the command line, and the ftp program got mightily confused.
   (Can this command earlier have been passed through the shell
   where the quoting was removed?)  Also noticed that the ftp
   command is too long to be shown in only 80 characters, so it
   wasn't possible to exactly copy down all the arguments to the ftp
   command.

   Anyway, ended up manually fetching the distribution sets,
   extracting them, doing MAKEDEV, installed boot code on the disk,
   configured /etc/rc.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf etc.  In
   the process I just had to forget /etc/fstab, of course, but I
   fixed that later.

4) Apparently, the Jan 22 snapshot was made on a "domestic"
   system, but the install sets didn't contain the `secr' set
   ("of course").  This had the unfortunate consequence that
   `passwd' refused to run due to missing shared libraries.
   Worked around by fetching source code, unpacking and compiling
   and installing `passwd' from local source.

A general comment on the new sysinst -- it seemed a little excessive
to require an interactive response for each and every external
command that is being executed -- this certainly incresed the need
to sit attentive by the console as the installation proceeded.

Regards,

- Havard