Michael Wolfson wrote:
> 
> At 9:08 AM -0400 7/21/01, Ken Wellsch wrote:
> 
> :)I expect copyright keeps us from stashing liberated copies of both Disk
> :)Tools and System Disk on the NetBSD ftp site.
> 
> I don't think anyone has asked.  In any case, there are Darwin equivalents
> that are open source that we could clean-room and modify to our needs.

It is pretty darn reasonable to assume your average NetBSD/macppc newbie
is experienced with MacOS and runs it, so the Sys Disk tutorial is just
excellent the way it is!  I doubt anyone wants dd'able copies...

> :)I am glad to see that unlike the 68k based Macs (at least a few years ago
> :)anyway), that I should be able to run NetBSD without MacOS on this box.
> 
> Yes and no -- it's good in that we don't require MacOS to speed up boot
> time and reduce the requirements, but not using MacOS makes our boot and
> install procedure significantly more complex on Open Firmware 1.0.5, 2.0.x,
> and 2.4.  And, to keep things consistent, this makes booting on Open
> Firmware 3 just as complex.

Well, from the user angle, I do prefer to boot NetBSD on my i386 boxes without
needing Windows, and on my sparc boxes without SunOS, and on my alphas without
using Tru64, and on my Dec/mips boxes without Ultrix, and on my VAXen without
say 4.3BSD and ... you get the picture.

Apologies that running "raw" makes life more difficult for the hardworking
NetBSD maintainer/developers.

> :)The S900 came without any peripherals save the floppy drive.  I'm planning
> :)to add the necessary hardware to produce a working box.  Hopefully I'll not
> :)run into "it needs Apple tweaked peripherals to work" ... and that being
> :)a clone box, it will not have other "features" that doom my attempt.
> 
> Since you've got a working video card, I think the only problem might be if
> you wanted to netboot and there's no built-in ethernet.  Everything else
> can be non-Apple.

This box (S900) has integrated AAUI/10BaseT.  So I'm safe there.  Since a
keyboard and monitor are just more baggage, I'm glad to report that talking
to OF via ttya is a snap on this guy.  (I've even pulled the graphics card)

> :)One clearly needs MacOS experience here; being an old UNIX dinosaur is a
> :)handicap I'll have to overcome if I want to run UNIX on a Mac/PPC I think.
> 
> [g].  Actually, you're past the MacOS problems, since System Disk doesn't
> work on your machine.  Now it's on to the Open Firmware problems.

As luck would have it, that was no problem at all.  I followed the
exceptionally well done NetBSD docs on NetBSD/macppc installation, the FAQ
etc. and was able to set the few things needed.

I booted from floppy and was talking to sysinst in a blink.

Now I will mention one of my experiences that I'm not sure I noticed were
answered in recent mailing list traffic.  The mc0 enet driver really does 
give sysinst heart-burn.

I think, while doing trial and error between a 1.5 floppy and 1.5.1 floppy,
I noticed the "proceed anyway?" option when the ping fails is no longer an
option with 1.5.1.

I actually thought maybe I had an enet problem.  But at some point I bothered
to ping the S900 and it responded.  So I tried an ftp and that worked also.

Since sysinst seems to put a pass/fail on the enet config ping test/step, I
had to manually do my own ftp'ing of the binary sets and then restart
sysinst and have it do a "get sets from a local dir" install.

I sort of remember this glitch with mc0 when I played with the m68k port
some years back.  ping would hang... and fail.

Cheers,

-- Ken