> I've just acquired a handful of hp300 hardware and, of course, I'd
> like to run NetBSD on it.

> The problem is _getting_ NetBSD on it.  [...]

Well, thank you, all of you, for responding (you know who you are).  I
now have the NetBSD 1.2 binary distribution installed on the machine.

The message that was the key to what I eventually did was from Louis
Watta, who said that if I had a working HP-UX system I should be able
to install 1.0.  That's exactly what I did; once I had 1.0 on it, going
to 1.2 was (almost) a complete no-brainer.

I also got messages from Mark Weilert and Jim Reid recommending that I
just dd SYS_INST onto the raw disk and try booting.  Having gained a
tiny bit more experience with the hp300, I now suspect that would have
worked too, though I didn't try it 'cause I already had a working
NetBSD system on the disk by the time I got those messages.

Incidentally, the install instructions for 1.0 say that they haven't
been tested on HP-UX earlier than 7.*.  They now have; the HP-UX
installation was 5.<something>, where I think <something> had a 2 in it
(that disk is not accessible at the moment).  The instructions worked
fine from the point of view of getting a working system on the disk.
The provided makedisk executable even worked as-is, despite being built
for a system two major versions newer than the one I was running it
under - it crashed with an error along the lines of "bad system call",
but it turned out it got far enough first to render the disk bootable.

I'm now doing minor fiddle stuff; I should have a working, usable 1.2
installation within another few hours of time in front of the box
(which probably means, by the end of the week - this is a spare-time
thing).

I love NetBSD.  Uniformity of OS across widely disparate hardware
platforms is *so* great.  And the support completely blows away any
vendor I've ever had occasion to deal with, with the possible exception
of Auspex.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
		     01 EE 31 F6 BB 0C 34 36  00 F3 7C 5A C1 A0 67 1D