Subject: Re: Need Install help
To: Martin Brennfleck <brma@krisal.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de>
From: Ted Lemon <mellon@vix.com>
List: port-pmax
Date: 05/04/1995 16:33:47
[This is my standard boilerplate reply to your question.   Please give
me some feedback if you try the procedure below - I haven't had any
yet.]

It's not easy to install yet, but it's out there and you can build it
with itself.  My latest attempt at installation instructions is
included below.  Please be aware that this port is a bit raw yet.  It
basically works, but it can behave badly under the wrong
circumstances.  For example, there's a bug in the DECstation 3100
interrupt code that causes it to occasionally fail to boot when
there's traffic on the ethernet.

Keep us posted on your progress if you decide to go ahead with an
install, and we'll try to help if you have trouble.

			       _MelloN_


[Installation instructions]

As far as binaries go, you need to get a miniroot from
gregorio.stanford.edu - this is something that Jonathan Stone has
prepared - and then you can get the rest of the binaries from
ftp.netbsd.org in /pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/binary.   There's an Ultrix
binary version of disklabel in the pmax/tools directory, and you
should probably use Jonathan's bootblocks - copy them into /usr/mdec
on your Ultrix machine, then run disklabel with appropriate arguments
to install the bootblocks and start the A partition at an offset of
65536.   dd the miniroot on as follows:

    dd if=miniroot-file of=/dev/rzXc bs=512 skip=65536

You should be able to boot that.   Once you're in, you can build a
root filesystem at the beginning of the disk as the b partition, and a
/usr after your a partition, newfs them, mount them as /mnt and
/mnt/usr, mount your Ultrix drive with the install binaries (readonly,
please), untar the binaries onto /mnt, halt the system, reboot Ultrix
and fix the partition table with the Ultrix disklabel, shutdown again,
and boot NetBSD.   Sounds easy, doesn't it?

BTW, I haven't tried this ritual, so I don't promise that it works.
It's just slightly incrementally better than what the last person did,
and I *think* it should work.   The last person had to blow away his
Ultrix disk to get running, which is a little too scary for my taste.