Eric B. Krauss wrote:
[Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> I am running NetBSD with a 1.3 kernel.  I have a few questions:  should I be
> running the 1.3.1 kernel, or the -current kernel, and what is the difference
> between those two (or all three).

I believe that this is explained somewhere on the NetBSD website, but here
it goes again ;-)

The NetBSD operating system is under continuous development in an effort
to improve its performance, functionality, reliability, and hardware
support.  Like many software products, NetBSD follows a release cycle in
which several months of development are followed by a relatively
short release stage (usually 2-3 months) in which active development is
discouraged and most efforts are focused on making sure that the OS is as
stable and bug-free as possible.  This is done by branching the source
tree, creating a new release branch (the last one was in late October or
November, i.e. 1.3).  Development can continue along the mainline
development branch, but these sources are not made available to the public
until after the release branch is ready.  After 2 months or so of testing,
the release branch is deemed suitable for release and is "frozen" (no new
changes at all can be made).  At this point, all of the support NetBSD
architectures build their release distributions and the announcement is
made that a new version of NetBSD is available to the public.

Now, after the release, new bugs will inevitably be found in the released
version of the OS.  The mainline development branch will often contain
fixes for these bugs.  Some of these fixes are patched into the old
release branch, and when the release engineering team feels that enough
fixes have been made, the make a patch release, available as patches to
the older release's source.  Some supported architectures will go to the
trouble of actually building new release sets at this time, some won't.
The latest NetBSD patch release was made last month and is 1.3.1.

Now, while we're not in the "release" phase of the product cycle, we're in
the development phase, which is where we are now.  The mainline
development branch of the NetBSD source tree is known as NetBSD-current,
since it is the "current" state of the source tree.  Since it changes
rather rapidly from day to day, there are no guarantees made that it has
no bugs or that it will even compile on any given day (although the
project strives to make sure that it will at least compile :-)

So, if I were to recommend a version of NetBSD to run, it would be the
1.3.1 release.  This will mean getting a 1.3.1 kernel and 1.3.1 binaries.
It's best to always keep your kernel and binaries in synch with each
other.  Since 1.3.1 contains a number of bug fixes over 1.3, there is no
real reason to run 1.3.  Unless you are going to do NetBSD development,
there is no real reason to run NetBSD-current.  Between the 1.2.1 and 1.3
releases, there was tremendous mac68k hardware support added, so running
-current at that time made sense.  In my opinion, there have not been any
significant hardware support improvements made that would truly justify
running -current on the mac68k port at this time.  If for some reason you
decide that you still want to run -current, you'll need to download a full
set of -current binaries and install them like you do a normal release,
tho.
 
> How do I upgrade the kernel?  Through the installer in MacOS or within
> NetBSD?  Can you point me to a FAQ?

The INSTALL document has an upgrade section which describes how to upgrade
between releases.  It can also be applied to -current, I suppose.  I
believe that Mark Andres also has an upgrade howto available on
www.macbsd.com (at least I think I put a copy of it there).  How exactly
you upgrade the kernel will kind of depend on what format you get it in.
The Installer will handle gzipped tar files or raw kernel files.  If you
upgrade from within NetBSD, all the tools you need are available to you.
Just make sure that you keep a backup of any currently working kernel that
you have.

> I also need step-by-step instructions for setting up X.  Can you point me to
> a FAQ for this, and any other related information I'll need to know? 

I believe that there is also an X setup howto on www.macbsd.com.  The
howto URL should be:

http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/howto/

> It
> sems that most of the FAQ's are tailored towards experienced users, and
> leave out a lot of necessary information that "newbies" would need.  I used
> to use UNIX in college and in law school, but I don't know anything about
> administering it, and the FAQ's just aren't complete enough for me (or many
> others, I suspect).

Well, the FAQ and many of the HOWTO's generally assume that you have a
working knowledge of Unix from a user's perspective.  I'm not about to
write a book on the subject where there are _many_ wonderful tomes already
written on the subject.  There are also a couple of _really_ good books on
Unix system administration available as well.  Take a look at the Meta-FAQ
for a list of such works.

Keep in mind that we're always looking for more documentation.  If you
feel that something is lacking, please feel free to whip up something and
submit it.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.