I don't want to rekindle the whole advocacy thread thing again, but I have a
new SPARCstation 20/71 sitting behind me.  It's been sitting here for the
last 2 weeks, while I'm still typing this on the same old SPARCstation 1.

Why?

Well, lots of things - partially laziness on my part, partially because I
was waiting to get ADSL (I'm afraid I won't get a working PPP setup going
under NetBSD and will lose my Net access, etc.), etc.

But through all of this I'm thinking, "If there was a 1.3.3 CD-ROM I could
toss in, say ``boot cdrom'' and have it come up into ``sysinst'' and do
the install from there - I'd have had this thing up and running and the
SPARCstation 1 tossed in the trash by now".

I find it rather troubling that we don't have such a mechanism yet.  How
do we expect to get new recruits into the fold when we support a gazillion
ways to do installs, except the most obvious and easiest one?  The present
situation is ridiculously arcane - how am I, on a modem line, supposed to
get the bits down to my home?  It looks like I'll have to burn a CD-R at work,
hopefully with the right bits in the right places.  Nowhere in the INSTALL
doc does it say what the layout should be for such a beast.  In fact,
in general the INSTALL doc presupposes that you have an existing system
to load the miniroot via (uh, this SS20 has a fresh 2 Gb Hawk disk), or
that you can netboot it (uh, I only have the SS1 and I only have one
monitor, am I supposed to go buy a VT100 somewhere?).

This isn't meant to be a flame, and perhaps I'm missing something obvious
(with apologies to greywolf), but I see this as a gaping hole in our
ability to attract new recruits.  Installation is the very first thing that
someone has to grapple with, and if the most obvious mechanism isn't
available, it's going to undoubtedly turn some potential new users away.
Please tell me that somebody (mrg?) is working on this  :-)

	- Greg