Sometimes I wonder what drives me...

Anyway, my flirt with LinuxPPC didn't last long, so now I'm back trying to
get NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA(2) running on my first version iMac DV special
edition. Meanwhile, I have been playing around with pdisk 0.8a2 to juggle
my partitions (no, open heart surgery doesn't scare me).

Last night I downloaded 1.5.1_BETA (only to find, when I was searching for
something else later, that 1.5.1_BETA2 was being uploaded) and attemted to
install it. Of course, netbsd.ram.gz didn't contain an ethernet driver, so
I couldn't ftp any sets. I had to resort to the 20001125 snapshot's
GENERIC_MD to get it up. The ofwboot.elf also gave me some problems, and I
don't understand how the install notes can CLAIM (pun intended) that OF 3
(which I supposedly have in my iMac) will even boot the netbsd.ram.gz
directly without ofwboot.elf. All I get if I try is CLAIM FAILED.

Anyway, and in the most roundabout way, I got it to a point where I could
boot the install image, and use the network. Now, I have three partitions
which I wish to use for NetBSD, partition 11 for /, 12 for /usr, and 13 for
swap. With disklabel they were not reported at all; it only showed HFS
partitions. So I changed the partition types to HFS with pdisk (cumbersome,
as you have to remove the partition and create a new one of the right type,
but hey, that's pdisk allright.) This got the partitions to show up, as
wd0e, wd0f and wd0g, respectively. I mounted fine, newfs'ed fine, and got
the sets installed fine with pax. Booting went, well, it went, at least. It
seems NetBSD prefers to mount from wd0a, and gets a bit fuzzy if it can't.
I was prompted for the root partition, and typed wd0e inbetween numerous
messsages of timed-out interrupts or somesuch. Well, it booted. However,
last time I attempted using NetBSD on this machine, I didn't have that
problem.

I seem to recall reading somewhere about the significance NetBSD puts into
partition types and names, so I just tried to rename and retype the
partitions to their canonical values: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 "A/UX Root" (or
should that be "A/UX Root slice 0"???), A/UX Usr and A/UX Swap, without
luck so far. I don't want to be a NetBSD developer, I just want to be a
(happy) user. I'm at a point where I almost regret having the iMac. (But
OTOH, had it not been for my Macs, I would perhaps be using FreeBSD instead
of NetBSD.)

It seems to me that a lot of work is being put into making NetBSD-macppc
work "the same" for all kinds of machines; and unifying also the
installation guide etc. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to divide this
into "variations", so that if a user possessed a macppc variant "OF 3, USB,
built-in ethernet, no floppy", he could simply concentrate on install
methods relevant to this variant, without worrying about other OpenFirmware
versions' bugs, and could also use an installation method that was suitable
for booting from HFS and getting sets from the network. (Ie a fat
netbsd.ram.gz for this variant; and a lean one for the people who are
unfortunate enough to have to use floppies.)

Sorry if I am rambling here, I couldn't help it, the combination of the
local heat wave (25 deg C in Denmark _is_ a heat wave for this time of
year!) and NetBSD seems to get to me. At least I feel a little better now.

-Lasse