Howdy.  Some friends and I have assembled a big stack of 68040 slabs and
we'd like to get some kind of *n*x running on them.  So far we've tried
to boot Linux and NetBSD, with similar results: tftp loads the kernel,
no hitch.  NFS _appears_ to work fine (server claims to have allowed the
mount, screen output on the NeXT looks like it has the mount), then
"something" causes a crash right after the root filesystem is mounted.

I'll spare you the Linux details ;-) but here's what's happened so far
with NetBSD.  There are subtle differences in screen output depending on
whether we cold boot, use a plain "b en" boot command, or use (from the
NetBSD net boot web page) "ben()netbsd".


If I cold boot the NeXT it flops with the line:

Load of en()diagnostics: No such file or directory


If I use "ben()netbsd" it flops with the line:

Load of en()netbsd: No such file or directory


If I use plain old "ben" it flops with the line:

Load of en: Inappropriate file type or format


In each case, unlike with Linux, it puts me at a boot: promt, whence
<enter> puts me back to the NeXT> prompt where I can try again, so
that's something.

Like I said before, we have a big piloe o' slabs, and we don't see any
alteration in behavior depending on which unit we use, so I'm assuming
that this is not a problem with the NeXen themselves unless it is a
problem with _all_ of them.  (They did all come from the same dustbin,
so it is possible that they all came from the same production run, but I
still suspect that we have done something wrong ourselves.)

Thanks for any suggestions.

-m