>>I believe you will need a video card and monitor long enough to
>>install the operating system.  (Obviously, the BIOS of most PeeCees
>>does not take kindly to serial "consoles".)

>I had always figured on having to install on a machine with a video card
>(or perhaps build a system on another drive and then move the drive over).
>But I think that if you built a set of boot floppies with serial boot blocks,
>then you _could_ do it ...

Yes, that's probably a doable option.  However, there are just too
many uncertainties before the NetBSD boot blocks even get loaded if
you're trying to bootstrap a system that hasn't been used in awhile
(as I'm sure you're aware).  You could be driving yourself crazy
trying to figure a nagging problem, which might be explained very
simply with a video card, a monitor, and five minutes of tweaking.

>>Once you have everything set up the way you want it, and have a kernel
>>built and installed with a serial console, you should be able to yank
>>the video card and reboot.

>Did you still keep the keyboard attached?  And I assume you used COMCONSOLE
>to force a serial console?

Well, yes, actually, I did in the end.  I also had the video card in
it most of the time, too -- cardless was just a few minutes to prove
to myself it could be done.

What I was trying to do was get an Apollo fixed-frequency workstation
monitor up on my video card.  The monitor wouldn't do PC scan rates,
so was useless until xdm brought up X with a properly set of tweaked
timing parameters.  I did booting, rebooting, killing and restarting
of xdm via an old Kaypro 2000+ laptop running Kermit, hooked up
through a serial port.  I had COMCONSOLE set up to run 9600 baud.

It worked exceptionally well.  My only minor gripe was that I couldn't
run PCVT and COMCONSOLE simultaneously.  You have to let the video
card and keyboard be a standard PCCONS terminal if COMCONSOLE is
enabled.  This shouldn't be a problem in your case.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
       --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
     NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, HP300, Sun3, Sun4,
                           DEC PMAX (MIPS), DEC Alpha, PC532
     NetBSD ports in progress: VAX, Atari 68k, others...
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