> > Supposing I do have a floppy drive, how do I make a bootable floppy? I
> > assume I go to:
> > ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.2/macppc/installation/floppy/
> > and get boot.fs, and write it using dd to a floppy disk.
> 
> In the FAQ on the web page.
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html#write-floppy

I guess I'm being pedantic, but it doesn't say WHAT to write, nor does the
install documentation. Rather than complain any more, I'll change that.

> He's willing to accept diffs against the current INSTALL, so if you
> get things working and have time, *please* improve our documentation.
> If I get a chance, I will too.

I will be glad to help out.

> The floppy uses the GENERIC-MD kernel, as I recall, but you can't just
> write that kernel to a disk. That's why the boot.fs is supplied, it's
> written to a <GACK> file system, mounted from there (obviously) into
> an mfs one. All of this wrapped in a way that makes OF happy (it wants
> to see an HFS-like partition to boot files out of).

One of the first things I will try to do is to find a consistent way to
create bootable CDs so that people do not need to maintain an extra hard
drive.

Then, it should only be a matter of creating a new CD when one wants to
upgrade the kernel.

This is extremely important to me, as I plan to colocate a good ten hour
drive away from where I live. My Amiga 4000 is colocated only an hour
away; but even if the computer needed to be restarted, it could do so
unattended.


> > It seems that there are lots of people who need to get past this point,
> > but the people who have gotten past this point are not talking... Come on,
> > help out!
> 
> John, understand that we're a lot newer in the water than Amiga is.
> The hardware's newer, and we haven't been working on it anywhere near
> as long. A lot of the acoutrements you're used to simply aren't here
> yet. (Feel free to add them.)

I will! I fell in love with NetBSD within hours of installing it on my
Amiga, and I got this G3 specifically to run NetBSD. I plan to help
wherever I can.


> don't think there are all that many B&W G3s up and running... not
> because it's impossible, just because not very many people have tried.

It'll become much easier, I promise.


> > One drawback is that OF puts the 646 pciide controller in a polling mode
> > our firmware initialization doesn't reset, so while you can boot from an
> > ide disk, you then can't use it.
>        
> As I recall, that means you can either boot from it *or* use it as 
> your root, but not both.
>        
> (Thus all the talk of booting from CD-ROM.)

The email that I quoted gave me a clue: I put both the CD and the hard
drive on the non-ATA-66 bus, booted the 1.5-alpha ISO (the alias to the CD
as slave is Zip, interestingly), and it saw the hard drive.

I'll write a diff to the install, a small FAQ entry, and so on.

Regarding the 2930, it looks like I'll be booting off of the CD, mounting
the IDE as the root filesystem, and mounting SCSI disks off of the root,
so the Open Firmware issues won't be issues. As it is, I can get to the
device in Open Firmware, but I cannot list any drives.

The FAQ and diffs will be coming.

Thank you, everyone.

John Klos