Congrats is in order for the contributors to the pmax port.  In 96 I
acquired my first DECstation and it was like pulling teeth trying to get
my little MAXINE to boot, not to mention what seemed like endless stabs at
disklabel.  Soon after I lost interest and the box slowly worked it's way to
the bottom of the closet.  Last week however I thought I would take a little
refresher course in pmax installation.  With one exception this go around
worked flawlessly, even a little gui to configure the local disks.  I had a
smile a mile wide when I saw that little text menu.

  I'm truly sorry if this e-mail bothers anyone on the list serve but I
didn't know what other form to express my thanks to the maintainers, you
have done an excellent job.

  I would also like to make three suggestions for ease of install.  Take
them with a grain of salt because they stem from errors on my part, not
from anything broken with the pmax port.

  The first item concerns tftp boot.  I think the old netboot instructions
are much easier to follow and the issue I have pertains to them.  The "bf"
entry in the /etc/bootptab example does not tell a reader to put the full
(tftp) path to the name of the kernel image.  I'm sure there are numerous
reasons not to be this explicit but if it helps someone it might be worth
it.  FWIW this is explicitly documented in the new netboot help, but again
those directions were a little hard to handle for me.

  The second issue is with /usr/sbin/config.  If you take out ibus0 entry for
mainbus (PMAX & MIPSMATE) but not the devices that reference it (the four
devices listed directly below it in GENERIC) config does not tell you that
you have orphaned them like it would if you commented both of the ibus0
entries out.  You may think I'm out of my mind wanting dummy control like
this, but please if you understand why I'm wrong, just remember I don't.

  The third suggestion takes a little bit of explaining.  I purchased a
5000/240 about the same time I started tinkering again with my 5000/25 and
have yet to boot it.  The reason I have not finished installing may strike
you as odd but bear with the story.  To me the little icon on the back of
the machine for the db15 keyboard and mouse port looked to like a printer.
Because this machine did not come with a fb and until today I had not seen
what one looked like, I thought that the keyboard and mouse port would be on
that same turbochannel card.  Keeping what I have told you in mind, I
skipped over much of the archived mailings about setenv console command
thinking that this data did not pertain to me.  So to make a long story
short someone might want to include that to netboot a machine with this
db15 port you need a keyboard.  I want to qualify this with the following
remarks, and I promise this will be my last winded qualification.  I still
have not gotten anything to come through the serial port labeled 3 on the
back of the machine.  Because of this, all my babble could be for naught
if the machine is just broken.  Maybe when I get a keyboard and tell it to
use serial console I'm still not going to see anything on that serial port.

  Well, after all this, thanks again to the pmax team.

  Jared Agnew