Hi all,

After a long NetBSD hiatus, I have just installed NetBSD 2.1 on my
Centris 650 using sysinstall. The program seems nice, but has some
problems that make it pretty much useless for "newbies", IMO.

I have a 50GB drive in my Centris and I would like to eventually have
two separate NetBSD installations on the computer, so I first created
a partition map approximately like this:

   Size      Type         Mount Point (name)
  --------------------------------------------
   500 MB    HFS          (C650 Disk)
   400 MB    BSD Root     /
   400 MB    BSD Root               -- to be root of 2nd installation
   275 MB    BSD Swap
 35000 MB    BSD Usr      /usr
 14000 MB    BSD Usr                -- to be usr of 2nd installation

Well sysinstall complained about the second root partition, so I
changed it to apple_scratch. After partitioning, sysinstall claimed
to newfs and fsck the new BSD partitions, but that wasn't true.
I ended up having to newfs the partitions myself. I also found out
that sysinstall doesn't bother mounting the partitions, even though
it tries to install on them as if they were mounted. After I mounted
them manually the install seemed to work fine.

The worst part came on reboot though. The computer rebooted into
multiuser mode but the root file system was read-only. This turned
out to be because /etc/fstab contained no entry for the root file
system. Well, it did include an entry but it was commented out. There
was a line for every partition but all of them were commented out
except the line for /usr.

Well I obviously needed to edit /etc/fstab but it was on a read-only
filesystem, which I couldn't remount read-write because NetBSD had no
idea what sort of file system it was. I managed to do it by booting
the INSTALL kernel, exiting sysinstall, mounting the partition, and
then finally editing the file with ed - which was quite an adventure
since I think the last time I used ed was approximately 15 years ago.

It seems to me that sysinstall is supposed to make installation
easy, but without fixing some of these problems, it just makes it
really difficult for new users to try NetBSD. Of course, maybe these
things only happen on mac68k.

Now that my system is up, though, I noticed that there aren't any mac68k
binary packages for NetBSD 2.x. If this is simply due to lack to compile
time, I am willing to do some compiling. I will have to do it anyway for
the packages I want and it's not a big deal for me to compile other
packages too. I have plenty of disk space and a fast (for a mac68k)
computer.