Well, we wasted a bunch of time this afternoon (and time over the past
few days downloading and learning) trying to install NetBSD on our
5000/120. Unfortunately I didn't check the label on the framebuffer
until after it told me it was switching to the serial console (and
consequently screwed up the screen display to be unreadable).  The
machine here has *two* PMAG-C boards (but only one monitor, alas), and
our primary purpose for it is to be an X11 capable workstation.  I
suppose we could go ahead with the NetBSD install and run it as a server
for a spare NCD Xterm, but that kinda spoils the benefit of having that
accelerated framebuffer and the nice big 19" colour display.....

So, from the INSTALL notes it says the PMAG-C has an onboard i860
processor and that there's no documentation available for it.  How
deeply have people pried into Digital for such documents?  Is it worth
me trying with my meager contacts?  Is there any chance of reverse
engineering the Ultrix drivers?  Is the X11 server support there once a
driver is available (as is hinted in the manual page), or am I just
dreaming?

In the mean time does anyone have a spare supported framebuffer
available for sale?

BTW, the install from Ultrix using the diskimage in swap works great,
though there are no step-by-step instructions, so if you don't know both
NetBSD and the related hardware and native OS quite well it can be quite
a chore.  For instance it took quite a bit of poking and memory
gymnastics before I remembered to type 'pstat -s' to see if the swap
partition was big enough or if I'd over-write the next one with the
diskimage.  Since Ultrix doesn't normally have gzip it's also a good
idea to ungzip everything on the ftp server first too.  I still haven't
figured out how to read the disklabel with Ultrix, though the 'rzdisk'
utility seems quite handy (the display of the mode pages is nifty, but
it didn't seem complete -- I don't recall seeing ARWE/ARRE settings in
page 1).  It would also be handy to say where to find (or how to find)
the equivalent of 'dmesg' output (unfortunately the boot messages didn't
say "PMAG-C").  Also, given a machine already running Ultrix, and with a
big enough swap partition, I'd strongly recommend the "diskimage from
Ultrix" install procedure over trying to set up a netboot server -- it
should just work in most cases, doesn't require an extra machine, and
won't require any special local network services (other than perhaps a
local FTP server if you want it to go fast) or worries about PROM
capabilities (at least for the 5000 series).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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