Subject: Re: mobilepro 770 documentation
To: Christopher Hobbs <chris@megahurted.com>
From: Matthew Orgass <darkstar@city-net.com>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 05/14/2004 22:18:34
On 2004-05-14 chris@megahurted.com wrote:
> > I am soon to be the proud new owner of an NEC MobilePRO 770.  I was
> > curious to know if there was a HOWTO or installation guide for
> > installing NetBSD on the 770.  I currently have the NetBSD System
> > Manager's Manual for mips and am reading through it.  I'm a frequent
> > FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux user, but am fairly new to NetBSD.  Thanks in
> > advance for any help you may be able to provide!

  The install doc is on the ftp site with the release sets.
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcmips should have a link and has a little
bit of additional info as well.

  However, I find sysinst in general to be more annoying than helpful.
All you need to do is fdisk and disklabel the partitions, get the sets,
untar them, and do MAKEDEV all.  It can be entirely done from a
NetBSD/i386 machine, although probably not your systems due to disklabel.
If you forget the last step init will automatically mount a mfs fs over
/dev and do a MAKEDEV every time you boot, which takes forever due to mips
pmap implementation (but you can at least unmount it and MAKEDEV the disk
fs while the system is running).  If you fdisk a card that has a msdos
partition and keep a dos partition at the beginning of the disk, remember
to zero the first few bytes or else CE will not notice that it has changed
(I don't think sysinst does this for you either).  You can pkg_add stuff
(such as your favorite editor) from single user to configure.  I think
sysinst has added a few configuration details since I last used it so it
might be a bit more helpful now.

  One additional modification I recommend is replacing /etc/rc with a
custom script that does just what you want.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com