Well, we grabbed the latest copies of binaries from pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc
on sun-lamp and between us followed the instructions, and

	*	On a Sparc 1 with 8Mb memory, you get a panic
		after what appears to be inetd's spartup. It
		is may be because with of memory demands that
		it has run out of thinking room or could it be
		the revision of the EPROM (1.3) or board itself.

	*	On a Sparc2 clone with a Weitek chip inside it
		and some serious memory it boots like a charm.
		Unfortunately, I would normally be refused
		access to this machine on any regular sort of
		basis at practical times during a working day
		so I will have to go on dreaming about the
		50Mips, 8Mflops and 64Mb of memory.

The following needs to be added and highlighted in the install notes:

** You must have the boot drive set to sd0 (ID=3).  While it will
** boot from any drive, it panics because this kernel does not appear to
** be able to use a root file system and swap on anything other than sd0.

Correct me if I am wrong but sd1 ( my original choice because sd0
was a working copy of SUNOS on it ) would not work for me.

The only real drama was being able to log in and while root has no
password, you cannot log in if root has no such item - and in single
user mode the command "passwd root" tells you to get lost.  There is
also no /usr/share/misc/termcap - actually no /usr/share at all - was
this a deliberate omission or an oversight? Unless I have missed
something, the following need to be added to the instructions.

*	grab a termcap with a SUN entry from elsewhere and
	copy this ( while you are in single user mode ) as in

		mkdir /usr/share
		mkdir /usr/share/misc
		cp file /usr/share/misc/termcap

	note that the root disk and usr must be mounted

		mount -u /dev/sd0a /
		mount /dev/sd0g /usr

*	add a user with vipw, say 'ss' with no password and also
	put that user in the wheel group.

*	boot the system, log in as that ancillary user.  You
	can put a password on that user, and then 'su'. You
	can now put a password on root with 'passwd root',
	at which point you can log in as root.

Just my $0.02c contribution unless I have totally lost it all.

My few questions are now:

*	as this is 0.9a, where can one find the sources that
	correspond to how it was built?  What relationship
	does this stuff have to NetBSD-current?  Apart from
	the 2 page readme, are there any other notes on this
	version and how things work, what has been done,
	what does not work, what work needs to be put in,
	what the relationship to the PC-based work is, etc?

*	I have not tried it but will netbsd work with a
	standard ascii terminal in ttya as the console - I
	had to borrow a b&w console to get things going
	and will not have access to it all the time.

*	talking about the sort of work needs to be done, how can
	we help getting things that need to get done - finished?
	This stuff looks great so with any luck and some careful
	planning it be that there are three of us here who can do
	work on it at various times during a day. Apart from the 1+
	we might be able to commandeer an IPC if we can find out
	how to live with only 8Mb of memory.

Thanks - Damian.

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