Re: Insights from successful, yet painful, install attempt.

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

> > So Amiga installation doesn't use sysinst? If it is a simple script, 
> > where could I find the source? The script does something useful: list 
> > the RDB partition table with NetBSD mapped device file, so you can 
> > chose the correct name for installation. I have not found any way to 
> > print this information after the install, that is quite annoying and 
> > dangerous if you intend to use dd.
> >
> > I asked a question on this list, but without definitive answer so far. 
> > Taking a look on how the scripts does this would help.

Is this what you're looking for?

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/distrib/amiga/miniroot/install.md?rev=1.33&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN

> > Apart from that, I felt your very same pains with the installation, 
> > like the lack of dhcp support. I ended up installing the system from 
> > WinUAE, by emulating a SCSI controller and a CD-ROM; then I took the CF 
> > card back to the real Amiga.

Since we're not trying to make miniroot.fs small enough to fit on a floppy 
disk, there really is no good reason to not have dhcpcd.

> > Thanks for sharing your experience! I feel less lonely now 😊 There 
> > is an interesting blog post about experience and tips installing NetBSD 
> > 9.1 in a Commodore Amiga here [2]. It mentions some of the current 
> > challenges, like the ptys, the lack of X11 support for native chipset 
> > and the makemandb one.

I think we need to revisit possible solutions for things like the initial 
makemandb or sshd run, like nicing and running in the background, and/or 
not running by default and printing a message on initial run if processor 
< m68040 or memory <= 16 megs, for example.

> Now, I have some packages installed on that netbsd, and I've played
> with X forwarding (displaying X11 apps on my laptop instead). I'm sad
> about there being few packages built in the repositories. There's no
> "modern" webbrowser (webkit/blink), but there's also no netsurf,
> almost no window managers. Also no wxgtk, which also means no
> wxpython.

There are some newer packages here, which is updated weekly:

http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amiga/9.0_2021Q3/All/

Or here, which is updated several times a week:

http://pkg.zia.io/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/m68k/9.0_2021Q3/All/

It seems that blink is in pkgsrc-wip, which doesn't make it in to the 
official pkgsrc bulk build repositories, but I can try to build it anyway.

netsurf, I think, requires gtk3, which we don't yet have, but is compiling 
now. We'll have to see if it completes on a system with 256 megs of 
memory.

We have ctwm, fvwm, icewm, matchbox, blackbox, for starters, in 2021Q3 :)

I'm happy to take requests, because I have a couple of '040 machines that 
aren't yet running bulk builds directly.

> As building packages on Amiga is slow (I have some experience doing
> that on netbsd 8), binary packages are critical. I hear that the
> reason we have few packages is that even with emulation, there's
> serious ram restrictions (2GB and ~512MB per process, due to
> limitations of current netbsd code around the m68k mmu), and that
> severely restricts the packages that can be built natively, or
> semi-natively (emulated m68k running netbsd).

It's speed more than memory at this point.

There are solutions for memory. one is that I have a Quadra 800 which can 
use 520 megs of memory, once it's finished. Another is that I could buy a 
Zorro III BigRam with 256 megs, or two, or three, and have 912 megs in an 
Amiga.

Speedwise, emulation isn't exactly ready yet, but there's lots of 
excellent work going on right now. Jake Hamby is working on an Amiga qemu 
target, there's Tetsuya Isaki's nono emulator, and Twitter user astr0baby 
has been posting about NetBSD/mac68k running in qemu incredibly quickly on 
an M1 Mac.

When emulation is ready, we'll certainly use it. Until then, I've just 
finished repairing an Amiga 3000 which has a 66 MHz m68060 in it which 
will be dedicatd to pkgsrc bulk package builds. Everything currently runs 
on a colocated 50 MHz m68060 which also does lots of other things, so 
having a dedicated machine will help lots. Also, since it will be able to 
share an NFS mount with several m68040 systems, automatic parallel 
building will be possible.

John