OK, I went with NetBSD, and everything went as expected.
 
I booted for the first time, mounted the fs and used vi to edit rc.conf.
 
Then I exited, and got not login, apparently from that ttye0 problem.
 
Since I couldn't do anything, I killed the power and rebooted, but now
I get "no file system for sd0; cannot mount root, error = 79" errors. 
 
Is there a way to fix this, or should I just reinstall and run the MAKEDEV
thing *before* booting into multiuser?
 
I cannot boot into single user mode, even with that option checked in the
booter.

-ct