Hello,

Maybe I chose a rather difficult place for venturing into the NetBSD 
world, but it appears to be the only free OS that runs on an O2.  I have 
plenty of experience with Linux and a little bit with FreeBSD (which I 
think is brilliant).  But in any case, here is some details as shown by 
the hinv command:

               System: IP32
            Processor: 150 Mhz R10000, with FPU
Primary I-cache size: 32 Kbytes
Primary D-cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary cache size: 1024 bytes
          Memory size: 128 Mbytes
             Graphics: CRM, Rev C
                Audio: A3 version 1
            SCSI Disk: scsi(0)disk(2)
           SCSI CDROM: scsi(0)cdrom(4)

As far as I could determine the latest version (1.6.1?) runs on this 
machine.  The information on the website is somewhat conflicting, as 
some say the machine is supported and others say it is not.  I guess it 
wasn't supported until recently and some of the documents have not been 
updated yet.

Now here is my real problem.  First, the documentation states that the 
bootable cd is not iso9660 formatted, but instead has the sgi header and 
things I don't quite understand yet so that it can be booted even if the 
prom does not understand iso9660.  This appears not to be the case, as 
the CD appears to be nothing more than a iso9660 created with mkisofs. 
So if I cannot boot it from cd, then I must boot it from the network, 
right?  I look in sgimips/binary/kernel and try the different kernels (I 
assume I should use netbsd-INSTALL.gz, unzipped of couse), but none of 
them boots on the O2.  It looks like it panics early on in the booting 
process, but the O2 reboots immediately (blanking the screen in the 
process) so I do not have time to read the error message.

I would appreciate any advice or help on this.  Alternatively, I could 
probably install netbsd on an i386 somewhere and try cross-compiling.  I 
had no luck cross-compiling linux 2.6.0-test9, even though it supposedly 
supports the IP32 now.

regards,
Izak
-- 
Man who speeds in town reaches red traffic light first.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Izak Burger                                  Email: iburger@cs.sun.ac.za
Homepage: http://www.cs.sun.ac.za/~iburger/  Tel: +27 21 808 4863

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