On Thu, 2 Mar 2000 Oliver.Schweitzer@i-dmedia.com wrote:

> The kernel boots, but when trying to access the CF, netbsd says
> 
> wdc0:0: not ready, st=0xa0, err=0x00
> wdc0 channel 0: reset failed for drive 0
> wd0d: device timeout reading fsbn 0 (wd0 bn 0; cn 0 tn 0 sn 0), retrying
> 
> repeat above... with variations in first line st=(0xfa,0xcc, 0x00,0x08)

> What am I doing wrong?


Nothing.  You need a new kernel
(ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/hpcmips/compile/GENERIC/netbsd).  Thanks
to Jun Ebihara for pointing me there.

I successfully installed NetBSD on my z50 yesterday, although I could not use
the sysinst procedure but rather installed NetBSD/i386 on my Intel laptop and
unpacked the file sets there.  This worked quite well and, at the moment, I
think it's the better way of installing since the wdc driver sometimes chokes
and hangs the z50, especially under heavy "disk" load.

Apart from infrequent problems with the disk driver, my machine now performs
as expected.  I installed a bunch of pmax binaries and they seem to run well,
although seemingly the shared library interface seems to have changed since
1.4.1, so some programs which load shared libraries themselfes (perl5 for
example) do not run.

One bad thing was this:  I let my z50 run tonight to see how long battery life
is with NetBSD.  When I reconnected the machine to the mains this morning, I
found the CompactFlash card being totally eradicated.  Uh.  Early adopters'
pitch.

The standard configuration with 16 MB RAM seems to be okay for many console
applications, although, on a silent system, I had only 6 MB free, so it is not
enough for emacs.  I guess I'll need to find myself a RAM expansion for that.

The speed of the console driver is severly lacking performance, to the ponint
where working with it is kind of unpleasant.  This seems to be a result of the
fact that there is no text mode in the video hardware, meaning that all text
output has to be done in bitmap mode.  This problem will be less significant
when X runs on hpcmips, as xterm can jump-scroll, but for the time being
clearing your screen often to prevent scrolling is the only cure I could think
of.

-Hans

-- 
finger hans@huebner.org for details