In message <19981013004159.A8396@zork.net>Nick Moffitt writes
>On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 04:35:06PM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
>> On Mon, 12 Oct 1998 23:11:59 -0700  Nick Moffitt wrote:

[snip cd stuff]


>	Well, here in San Francisco, I'm seeing a lot of these
>DECStation 5000/25s being chucked from IS departments and university
>labs left and right. 

Well, if you manage to snarf a couple, the NetBSD Project can
find good homes for two or three. Especially ones with expansion
RAM in them.


More often than not they've been landing in the
>laps of some well meaning Linux types who want to put an open-source
>OS on the thing.  I think that a general covering of the following
>topics would have made my installation experience much better:
> 
>	How drive partitioning works in Ultrix (chpt)
>	How drive partitioning works in NetBSD/pmax (disklabel)
>	How the boot console works (I had a devil of a time getting
>the ecoff kernel to boot, until I realized that it needed to go on the
>same partition as the Ultrixboot stuff.  Unfortunately, the root
>partition was only 16MB, and I had to do some creative symlinking and
>moving files between volumes to get everything to boot.)
>	
>	Partitioning was what held me up for the largest part.  I had
>to deduce the fact that some partitions were there to be ignored, and
>I have a heavily marked-up copy of the chpt man page lying next to the
>machine.  The overlap stuff was confusing to me, as the intel world
>tends not to display partitions that haven't been made active.

The idea of overlapping partitions and not using all of them is
entirely normal for the BSD world. Partly for historical reasons
(disklabel-style partitions used to be compiled into kernels), partly
for flexibility.

I think maybe we'd be better off with a ``BSD for Linux users'' page,
explaining how BSD uses disklabels and the partition info in a BSD
disklabel.  `chpt' is just an ugly special-case of that.

[prom syntax]
Copious info on DECstation prom syntax is (or was) on the Web page.
Maybe it needs to be more prominent.  

[where to put ECOFF root]

Hm. The drop-a-netbsd-kernel-into-Ultrix-root-and-boot-NetbSD (using
ultrix emulation to run the Ultrix binaries) install trick can,
obviously, used by people who already had Ultrix. I assumed such
people would be experienced Ultrix sysadmins, not people who had
newly-acquired an Ultrix box.

Simon: could you note the part about where to put an ecoff kernel on
an Ultrix root? I thought it was obvious, but apparently not.


[fdisk vs disklabel]



>	OK.  Well, there is a man page for fdisk, and another for
>adduser.  I'll look around--thanks!


Don't look at fdisk. Please.  fdisk is for supporting i386 Master Boot
Record (MBR) partition tables and bootblocks.  Those only exist on
systems which understand and use MBRs -- mostly systems with PROM
"BIOSes" that understand FAT filesystems, like DOS,Windows-9x, or NT.
It's not relevant to pmaxes -- tho' it would be, say, for a
little-endian ARC mips box.

There is _absolutely no point_ putting an "MBR" onto a pmax disk: the
pmax PROMs don't understand an MBR. Since the BSD and Ultrix
first-stage bootblock lives in the first 512 bytes of a disk -- the
same place as an MBR -- and it's very very full, the only thing that
writing an MBR will acheive is trash any bootblocks already on the
disk.

(OK, once you know what you are doing, you could carefully set up, by
hand, a non-bootable disk with both an MBR partition table and a BSD
disklabel, say for moving files between systems. Some day in the
medium future we may support user dameons that grok "foreign" PROM
labels, but for now, that's about it.)