Ted Lemon wrote:
> 
[...]
> 
> Part of the problem here is that the install process really is a pain,
> and no amount of clever documentation is going to fix that.  Until
> somebody (maybe me) gets their butt in gear and comes up with
> something a bit easier, there are going to be a lot of people having
> trouble with it.  Sigh.
> 

I don't find the install process to be so very painful, and I'm 
one of the unsuccessful people.

It's really only three steps:

1.  disklabel.  You have to do that to repartition the disk, anyway. 
The only complication is the boot blocks, and I don't see how that 
could be made any easier.  The tough part is always deciding what 
partitions and how big, and that's not specific to NetBSD-pmax. 
I've never seen a solution to that problem.

2.  dd the miniroot onto the newly labeled disk.  I followed the 
instructions on http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/pmax/pmax-install.html 
using seek=16 and no skip, and it worked for me.  What could be 
easier? 

3.  Boot.  There's not much we can do to make that easier.

For me, it started to get more difficult after this step.  On my 
monochrome DS3100 it booted up and ran fine, but only one character 
in four was visible on the console.  :-(  Still, I was able with 
a little perseverance to fsck the root and mount it read/write, 
ifconfig the ethernet, and nfs-mount a file system with another 
kernel.  I copied that to my root and booted it, but it paniced. 
:-( :-(

But in any case, I think the installation process is easier to 
do *and* to understand than a fancy automated process a`la FreeBSD.


-- 
Ted Spradley   tsprad@metronet.com  
Information tends to drive out knowledge.  [...] many people cannot
tell the difference between information and knowledge, not to mention
wisdom, which even knowledge tends sometimes to drive out. -Heinz Pagels