Pmaxen-folks,

	Just a quick note & a few questions.  I've got the
latest snapshot up an running on a MAXINE (Personal Decstation
5000/20, greyscale DEC monitor, with 16meg RAM) as of a little
while ago.  I used Arne's installation instructions, posted to
this list on Feb. 22.  I lost some time to an old RZ25 that I'm
now convinced is just plain dead, replaced it with a new Quantum
730 meg drive, and the install was relatively painless. Rather
than getting the tarballs over the network with rcp or NFS, as
Arne suggested, I simply loaded them up on my Ultrix partition
(gunzipped), and then

mount -o ro [ultrix partition] /mnt
tar --unlink -xvBpf /mnt/local/netbsd/[foo.tar]

and everything worked.  Weird note: if you leave off the
--unlink flag, as I did the first time (oops), you get a crash
/with (panic: trap) on the file var/db/libc.tags in the comp.tar
archive.  With the unlink flag, no problems.  [possibly stupid
question #1] How important is this file, and what does it do?

I had a tape drive (Exabyte) available to me; is there any
reason I couldn't have tarred the entire distribution onto a
tape and unpacked it from there?  [possibly stupid question #2]
How would I make a boot tape for NetBSD, or can you even do such
a thing?

I've noticed that I can generate a panic:trap crash at will by
trying to type ahead into the console before it's finished
giving me the output of the previous command.  Is this a known
problem, or specific to my hardware?

Arne's install instructions mention an etc.tar.gz file,
but this file isn't present in either /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.1 or
/pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/shapshot on gregorio.stanford.edu. 
Shouldn't it be there?  Where can I get a copy that will work
with this snapshot?

Two artifacts: the tarballs unpack and leave a symbolic link
from /sys to usr/src/sys, which is empty.  Likewise, there is a
symbolic link /usr/obj which points to /reno/obj, also
nonexistant.  The latter is a goof (?), but isn't /sys where the
kernel building files are supposed to live?  Right now, Arne's
miniroot is what boots from the PROM monitor; I'd build a kernel
to mount all the right partitions and so forth, but it is late
and I'm stumped.  What files do I not have that I ought, and
from there, how do I build a kernel?  I'd be happy to document
the procedure for adition to the Installation docs, as I'm sure
there are other NetBSD-newbies who will get stuck at the same
point I'm at right now.

Finally, if there is anything specific that I can
exercise/test/abuse/break on a MAXINE, lemme know.  

Thanks for the port!
paul