Hi, all.

First, the good news: The BIOS on my machine lied to me, when it said it
was disabling the cache. However, physically yanking the cache chips off
the board seems to have ensured that it's not going to use 'em. After
performing my butchery, I stop getting those annoying corrupt archive
messages... Mostly.

Now the bad news: I'm still having trouble getting things uncompressed
normally. I've managed to get the kern, etc, misc, and text packages to
"Extract" properly, but I'm having some trouble getting the others to do
their thing without some sort of error at the end. What I'd really love to
do is run cksum to see if what I'm getting matches what I should have, as
far as the chopped file parts are concerned.

Alas, there isn't a cksum binary to be found in the install filesystem, and
I can't find a binary online. This seems like something that would be
really useful to have when installing things. Where can I get a precompiled
binary of cksum? I'm not sure how to cross-compile from my Mac running
-current, and even if I knew how, I don't have a full set of sources. (I
don't remember the granularity with which source is available,
incidentally.) Is there a binary available in a trusted place somewhere? I
generally like to compile my own stuff, but since my system isn't installed
yet, it's tough. :)

Anyway. Next. I didn't get any errors when "Extract"ing my kernel set, so I
figured I'd try a quick boot to see if it loaded okay. I get a "short read"
error (IIRC) on bootup. I copied over the kernel from the boot floppy, and
gunzipped it. With that kernel in place, I boot fine, except for a panic
near the end that causes a reboot. But I expected something like that,
since almost NOTHING is installed.

I think the best thing to do right now would be to verify everything with
cksum. If someone could point me to a reliable binary, I'd be slavishly
grateful.

Incidentally, is there an easy way to establish communications of some sort
with the tools provided on the boot floppy? Assuming my serial port is set
up properly - and I haven't been able to test this yet - I might be able to
get a serial connection going between the new machine and something that's
a bit more... set up. If I could do that, it would likely go loads faster
than using the floppies exclusively. Also, I could simply toss over the
large tgz's, rather than playing with the chopped parts in the first place.
I'd be just as pleased with a runnable copy of cksum, at any rate.

Thanks in advance for the continued help! I *am* making some progress,
which is cool, and from what I can make out so far, the 66mHz machine is
pretty snappy under NetBSD.

--
        Mason Loring Bliss    /\    mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
     www.webtrek.com/mason   /()\   awake ? sleep() : dream();
<barbaric>YAWP!</barbaric>  /    \  Squeak to me of love!