Hello,

   I have wanted to get NetBSD running on my Jornada 720 since almost 6 months
   ago! I was so glad to find you site, since it seemed so easy. As your email
   address is at NetBSD.org, I assume you are somewhat official. Anyways, I
   tried to format the CF card from Linux. Is that wrong? I made the DOS
   partition a FAT16 one. Are they the same thing? And also, when you said to
   leave the rest for NetBSD, did you mean to format the rest of the drive in a
   NetBSD filesystem? I'm not sure how long ago your article was written, but I
   believe a new NetBSD is now out. Would that be fixed if I installed from the
   network? I currently get up to the .exe bootloader but cannot boot. I really
   wanted to try NetBSD as an alternative to Linux on my Jornada 720. Do I have
   to have NetBSD already installed on another computer to make this work? Are
   there any NetBSD LiveCD's? Thanks a lot!

   -- 
   -Rabbitt



Its been a long time since I built one of these from scratch, but I seem
to remember ....


1) You make two partitions on the CF card.  The first is a normal FAT16
   of, say, 5MB to 10MB or so.  You put the NetBSD MS-WIN CE boot loader
   there and a bootable kernel or "miniroot".

2) You create another partition on the CF card with id 169, or you can
   leave it unformated or, if you can, you can put a Berkeley FFS on it
   with the proper endian with type 169.  I did the last one from another
   system running NetBSD.

3) You then have to get a boot strap NetBSD system running.  I don't know
   what the official method of doing this is for the Joranada [anymore].
   There might be a miniroot type concept which is a single bootable file
   that contains a filesystem that it unpacks itself into memory to run
   the rest of the system.  This method will probably provide 'sysinst'
   which can be used to put the proper file system on the rest of the CF
   card and then unpack the rest of the NetBSD system [probably via a LAN
   connection].

3b) or..  if you managed to get a BSD FFS on the CF card external to the
    Jornada, then it is very simple to just unpack the NetBSD/hpcarm
    system onto the card directly.  This is what I did with a notebook
    computer running NetBSD/i386.


I assume you are asking for a LiveCD for a NetBSD/i386 system??  These
exist, as far as I know.  The simple bootable CD that is used for i386
installs would probably also work just fine.  You would write a smallish
.iso file to a CD and then boot the CD.  This would put you into the
'sysinst' menu, usually used to install NetBSD, and one of the options
there would be to exist to a 'sh'.  There should be enough stuff present
to set up a CF card for the hpcarm port, assuming that your hardware is
supported well by the install disk.  You would still have to get the
hpcarc files from someplace which might mean configuring the LAN manually,
or some such.


This probably wasn't helpful.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]