NetBSD at the 3rd Amiga-Meeting in Karlsruhe
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>From January 12th to 14th 1995, about 120 active and ex-Amiga-users, many
of them regularly also present on IRC at #amigager, held another of their
(more or less) famous meetings. The Meeting was the third one in Karlruhe,
and it took place at the Fachhochschule there. Participants came mostly
from Germany, and among them were some of the people, who made the
Amiga-port of NetBSD what it is today.

During the meeting, the NetBSD-Amiga users and hackers met to talk about
the future of NetBSD, here's what came out of the three hours of
discussion:

 1. Support of the port-maintainer
   The maintainer of the amiga-port, Chris Hopps, is short on time, and
   therefore some support from a second person with (write) access to the
   Amiga-part of the NetBSD-CVS-tree would be a Nice Thing to have. As a
   result of a long discussion, Ignatios Souvatzis offered to aid Chris by
   working on the integration of small isolated change requests and
   bugfixes so Chris can concentrate on the important work.

   It was also suggested to share the responsibility for different things
   (graphics, networking devices, or device drivers in general) between
   several people, so not everyone has to care about everything.

   Chris has yet to be mailed to see if the help offered is wanted.

 2. Keep an Amiga on the Net
   From the Amiga-people on the meeting, a Amiga has been kept online for
   more than two years now. For quite some time, this has been
   dusk.rz.uni-regensburg.de (A2000 owned by Hubert Feyrer), right now it's
   grizu.fh.uni-regensburg.de (A3000 owned by Ingo Reckziegel), but the
   latter will probably go away in the not so far future.

   Markus Illenseer suggested that we should try to keep an Amiga running
   NetBSD on the Net somewhere, to provide a machine where developers can
   look up things and test non-critical things (i.e. things that won't
   crash the machine :-). The machine would also be used to compile
   packages that would be offered for FTP from ftp.uni-regensburg.de then,
   providing ready-to-install binaries for NetBSD/amiga (and probably most
   other m68k-platforms). To offer such a service, the machine would run
   only official NetBSD releases, not -current.

   Possible places for the machine would be:
    o Markus Wild's home (Connected to eunet.ch with 160kBd, leased
      line)
    o In Thorsten Frueauf's room at the University of Karlsruhe (10MBd,
      would cost DM 150,- per year)
    o Fachhochschule Regensburg (currently 2MBd, soon 34MBd)

   To accomplish this goal, the following offers exist:
    o G|nther Grau has offered his A3000
    o Thomas Runge has offered an A3000T

   Markus Illenseer commited himself to ask Amiga Technologies and Village
   Tronic for Hardware-support.

 3. DraCo/060-port
   Ignatios Souvatzis is currently working on porting Michael Hitch's
   fastmem-loader and NetBSD/amiga itself to the DraCo mainboard and the
   M68060 CPU.

 4. Upcoming CDs
   Markus Illenseer's "Gateway!"-CD Vol. 1 contained the whole
   NetBSD-release on CD, in addition with lots of ready-to-run programs.
   Volume 2 is coming soon, and it will contain: o NetBSD V1.1 source
   (compressed) o NetBSD V1.1 binaries for all platforms, including Amiga &
   i386 o Binaries of the MIT X Window System for both NetBSD/amiga and
   NetBSD/i386 (Xfree) o Ready-to-install binaries from
   ftp.uni-regensburg.de for NetBSD/amiga.  o Documentation for users
   without Unix-experience

   From the marketing point, Gateway! Vol. 2 will most probably be sold
   similar to the "Meeting Pearls" CDs, which come from former
   Amiga-meetings and will be continued in the future. This means, the CD's
   itself will be as low as possible and won't include any money for the
   maker, but rather only contain a form for a money order to your bank, so
   anyone who likes the CD can donate some money. The money will be used
   for NetBSD in some sort then.

   Markus has also an offer from O'Reilly to produce a NetBSD-CD. This CD
   would be targetted to the i386-port mostly, but probably contain
   binaries for amiga and sparc, too. This is only an offer, and no commits
   have been made so far.

 5. Documentation
   The amiga-port's lacking up-to-date documentation. Several FAQs and
   lists have been written, but aren't maintained any longer. To do a
   little bit against this, the NetBSD/amiga FAQ will be updated by Hubert
   Feyrer occasionally.

   G|nther Grau has started to write some general NetBSD-documentation
   similar to some "Linux User Guides", but needs help. Thorsten Frueauf is
   willing to proof-read, but doesn't want to write himself. Noone else was
   found to help G|nther so far. :-(

   Markus Illenseer's X-FAQ and Hubert Feyrer's Networking-FAQ both
   need updating, but none of them has the time for it right now.

   Volunteers for documentation would be very welcome!

 6. NetBSD-users in Germany (Europe?)
   The main mediums for discussion among NetBSD users right now are the
   mailing lists at netbsd.org, and some Newsgroups (
   comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.announce, comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc). Both are in
   english language, and so far, no discussion forum for german (language)
   users is known to exist.

   Furthermore, a coordination of all german or even european NetBSD-users
   (not only the Amiga ones) would probably make sense, but no decisions
   have been made here.

 7. de.netbsd.org
   Several weeks ago, FreeBSD opened some servers in Germany, in the domain
   de.freebsd.org. If a reasonably large user community could be gathered
   (all ports, not just Amiga!), it might make sense to open a similar
   subdomain, providing faster access for FTP, WWW, SUP and maybe even CVS.

   Esp. the CVS would probably demand a bigger care & effort to implement,
   but noone was able to answer that question for sure. It's also
   questionable whether it's worth at all, as it's not known how many of
   the people with access to the CVS-tree would benefit from that.

   Furthermore, no hardware is available for offering such a service, as
   well as the network connectivity. No conclusion was made on this
   suggestion.

Participants of the Discussion (in alphabetical order):

 o Bernd Ernesti <erbe0011@FH-Karlsruhe.DE>
 o Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@rz.uni-regensburg.de>
 o Thorsten Frueauf <s_frueau@ira.uka.de>
 o Guenther Grau <s_grau@ira.uka.de>
 o Klaus Heinz <kamar@ease.rhein-main.de>
 o Markus Illenseer <markus@tiger.teuto.de>
 o Thomas Runge <runge@egd.igd.fhg.de>
 o Ignatios Souvatzis <is@beverly.rhein.de>
 o Markus Wild <mw@eunet.ch>

Further NetBSD/amiga users who were at the meeting but didn't take part in the
discussion were:

 o S. P. Zeidler
 o Klaus Burkert
 o Michael van Elst
 o Carsten Hammer
 o Matthias Scheler
 o Bernd Sieker
 o Michael Teske


Hubert Feyrer (hubert.feyrer@rz.uni-regensburg.de), 19960122

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Enjoy,

	Hubert

-- 
=============== Hubert Feyrer ============================================
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