On Fri, 6 Nov 1998 02:34:41 -0500 (EST)  Ashley Campbell wrote:

> Well, I got past my previous problem, but now it seems like I have an even
> bigger one. I tried to do a sysinst, but whenever anything on the system
> calls "tar", it stops with the error "Abort trap".

Whoa there!  I don't think the behaviour has been reported before.  What
release or snapshot are you installing, and what is the md5 of your tar
binary?

> I can install most of
> the system manually by untarring it on my Linux machine, but I can't quite
> figure out how to create /dev/console, which it needs to boot.

mona:~ 22> grep console /dev/MAKEDEV
	rm -f console drum tty kmem mem
	mknod console		c 0 0

So: "cd /dev", "mknod console c 0 0" would work.  You'll also need other
devices like disk devices, tty devices, etc.  Just maybe on Linux you
can simply do a "sh MAKEDEV all" in the dev directory and it will create
everything you need.  I've never used (nor seen :) Linux...

> And I'm
> assuming the kernels that I used to netboot will also boot the machine
> from the hard drive. 

No :-)  Netboot kernels are ECOFF kernels, whilst disk kernels are
a.out kernels.  If you're working from the 1.3.2 release, in the
../pmax/binary/kernel directory are two kernels - netbsd.ecoff.gz
is the netboot kernel, and netbsd.gz is the disk bootable kernel.

Simon.