On 11 Aug 1996, Eldee Stephens III wrote:

> Duo. Can anyone share personal experiences about NetBSD on a
> PowerBook?

It worked okay for me as long as I ran fsck every time I booted.
Filesystem damage was near-continuous.  Smaller partitions aren't damaged
as easily or as fatally, if you keep a separate /usr, that's what will get
trashed, even if all your filesystem changes are on a third partition, or
at least that's been my experience with 'em.  I don't know why that would
happen, though.  The root partition only gets problems if it crashes while
booting (i.e. when your serial console is a Classic II with messed up
ports).

I think I'm going to give the sbc kernel another try.  I hosed my /usr,
but thankfully had lots of backups, so I didn't lose anything.  All my
files are now updated on the IIsi, so I have nothing to lose on the PB145.

> While I am here, I might as well ask this question... what third-party
> software has been ported to NetBSD for Macintosh?

Current "contrib" archive on puma currently has perl, pine, pico, bash,
lynx, qpopper ( I think ), and NCSA httpd 1.5a.  Those were the only
things suggested (not counting TeX) in my RFC to this list.  If anybody
has ideas for other things to put on puma/distribution CD, drop me email.

The only thing that wouldn't compile was archie.  I don't know why.

> If there is a good
> amount, would anyone be interested in doing a NetBSD for Macintosh
> CD-ROM distribution with me once NetBSD 1.2 is released? I have access
> to CD-ROM writers, and would be very interested in putting together
> such a package. It could even have a live filesystem in the CD itself
> so that one could boot NetBSD off of the CD! I would only charge the
> amount that it would cost to produce the CDs and the shipping.

Something deep inside my mind says it might be wise to wait until 040 macs
are working completely, and until the SCSI is working a little better on
PowerBooks.

> It
> could even come with a hardcopy of the NetBSD Users Manual. Anyone
> interested? Allen?

More than a users manual...  detailed installation notes for newbies would
be nice, along with the FAQ....

I have some install instructions that to my knowledge nobody has ever
tried.  If anybody has the time, it'd be nice to get several people's
input on additions and changes.  You can find the page at
http://www.macbsd.com/~davagatw

One technical question for ppl who are more familiar with NetBSD's CD-ROM
capabilities:

Can one use a CD-ROM's partition for NetBSD, or does it have to be in
ISO-9660 or whatever the number is, which would effectively negate the
ability to include the Mac-Side utilities (except maybe in a .sit.hqx
form....

Could the installer be patched to work correctly from a UNIX format CD
with a software-simulated partition table?

Thoughts?

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
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