Commodore A2386 BridgeBoard running NetBSD

[John Klos <john%sixgirls.org@localhost>]

> > > I wonder if anyone has ever run NetBSD/i386 on an
> > > i386 bridgeboard <andy desperately fumbles to stay
> > > on-topic>
>
> As far as I recall, you could run NetBSD on a bridgeboard.. but I could
> also be very, very wrong- I haven't played with any Amiga hardware in
> several years now.

The BridgeBoard can be used as a complete standalone computer. Assuming
you have the ISA slots for ethernet and some sort of mass storage, you can
set up everything else as though it's standard PC hardware. Before I
discovered BSD, I ran Slackware on a BridgeBoard.

There are two things, though: one, I doubt the PC side Janus would be of
any use to any kind of Unix, unless someone knows x86 and were feeling
ambitious. The other thing is that in order to get the machine to boot,
you need to load the Janus library on the Amiga side.

So, if you're running NetBSD on the Amiga, too, you'd have to boot an
AmigaDOS partition (no bootblocks!), allow the Janus library to load, then
run loadbsd. As soon as the Janus library loads, the PC system boots like
a normal PC would.

The lack of a display handler on the Amiga side (in NetBSD) is, of course,
not a limiting factor, since one can easily administer a NetBSD machine
via ethernet. I think that running NetBSD on an 8 meg system requires some
patience, though.

Good luck,
John Klos