Hello,

> Ain't feedback grand?
Sorry, I can't reproduce your problems, although my machine is a tad different ( S900, 300MHz G3/1MB, 400MB RAM )
Your / seems to be pretty small - mine is ~200MB with ~8GB /usr sitting on a 9GB Seagate Barracuda. Building the whole system always failed so far with weird syntax-related error messages - didn't get around to investigate, but I didn't see a single kernel panic yet. Maybe it helps to add some swap space and mount /tmp or /var/tmp as a sufficiently large memory filesystem ( I'll probably do that myself, just to speed things up, see man mount_mfs ). Too bad I don't have the dual 604e CPU cards anymore so I can't test the MP stuff ( my S900 came with 2 CPU cards, each carrying a 233MHz 604e ).
I can however confirm your OF-related booting problems - OF steadfastly refuses to load ofwboot from a ZIP drive, says it cannot LOAD from sd@5:0 or anything that's not sd@0:0. Loading ofwboot.xcf from a CDROM or the ZIP ( something like sd@5,\OFWBOOT.XCF ) works though.

good luck
Michael