Re: netbsd1.3 alpha

[Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios%theory.cs.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

> 
> First of all, thanks for all the hard work on this and all past netbsd
> releases, it's appreciated by everyone.  I had a couple questions/comments
> about the snapshot.
> 
> First of all, I was only able to get the install to work by doing a minor hack
> to install.md, changing the mount flags to -oro instead of -ro, I dunno if

Sounds like a typo... I'll check later today. Thanks for reporting.
[Finding this sort of things is one of the reasons we have an
additional ALPHA period after feature freezing the release branch...
after all, the original code _was_ already alpha tested by the people
tracking the -current sources, right?]

> that is particular to my configuration, but I thought I'd mention it in case
> anyone else was having problems mounting amigados drives to extract the
> snapshot.
> 
> Second, I was kinda hoping that the gvp i/o device would be supported in this,
> but it doesn't appear to be, although there's various gio things in the
> -current source (my troubles getting that working are a whole 'nother story ;)
> ).  Can anyone shed any light on this?  Netbsd isn't nearly as exciting
> without the net part. :)

Sorry. The available experimental device by Steve Lemieux seems to
contain code originating from Linux, which can't be included due to
their licensing restrictions. I would have asked the original author
for permission to include it using our license, but decided to write a
short frontend to the generic com.c instead which is the way it should
be done. Unfortunately, the hardware description gained from gazing at
the former driver wasn't precise enough to get it running in time.

> I was messing around with x, and got everything going and it was working fine,
> but then I mounted an ez135 drive, and the whole screen got corrupted and was
> a weird "random pixels placed over the current screen" kinda thing, when I
> typed things in an xterm, I could see things moving in an   XOR sorta way, but

Yes. You forgot to run the "xconsole" program, so messages about the
ez135 moutning, maybe error messages, were written in text mode,
curropting the graphics mode view of the screen memory.

> On a side note, how do you quit X?  I just do a shutdown -r ; reboot, but
> that's less than desirable. :)

You didnt' mention how you started it. If you startx it after login, it
will simply go away after the last X application closed, or (if you
didnt disable it) by using ctrl-alt-backspace, or by killing the X
server. If you run xdm, you can get back to the console login prompt by
killing the master xdm process. You need to leave the getty's running if you
do this, but this is possible with NetBSD/Amiga (and e.g. Sparc)'s
console device (as opposed to NetBSD/i386).

Regards,
        -is