Subject: Wscons in NetBSD 3
To: None <port-sparc@netbsd.org>
From: Victor Lagerkvist <plumsaren@gmail.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 01/28/2006 11:24:26
Greetings, I've recently acquired an old Sparcstation LX on which I
have installed NetBSD. As an old Dvorak user I became slightly
frustrated when I noticed that there was no way to select Dvorak as
your standard keyboard-layout in the installation process, but since
there weren't much writing involved I didn't think anymore about it.

When everything was finished I booted into my shiny new system, and
ran the "wsconsctl -w encoding=3Dus.dvorak" command which should have
changed my keyboard layout to Dvorak from qwerty. However, instead of
getting rid of qwerty I got the following message:

wsconsctl: /dev/wskbd: Device not configured

As far as I understand wscons is inactivated in the generic
sparc-kernel, so I guess this makes sense. The next logical step was
of course to include wscons in the kernel, so I downloaded the
kernel-source from NetBSD.org, untarred it and used the following
kernel config:

http://web.comhem.se/~u83106053/SPARK

However, after a few hours make stopped with the following message:

ld -n -T ../../../../arch/sparc/conf/kern.ldscript -Ttext F0004000 -e
start -X -S -o netbsd ${SYSTEM_OBJ} ${EXTRA_OBJ} vers.o
kbd.o(.text+0xf8c): In function `sunkbd_wskbd_cngetc':
: undefined reference to `prom_cngetc'
*** Error code 1

Luckily this was easily solved by removing the "static" declaration
and definition on "prom_cngetc" in /usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/dev/kd.c

Make completed with no errors, so I backuped the old kernel, copied my
new one to /netbsd and rebooted. However, 20 seconds in the boot
process I get thrown into the OK-prompt with this message:
 "Watchdog Reset" "Data Access Exception"

I've also tried compiling a generic kernel without wscons, which
worked, so I guess the error is somewhere in wscons.

But now to the question, is there a way to include wscons in the
kernel, or is there another way to switch keyboard layouts(in console
mode, so Xmodmap is sadly not an option)?

Hardware: Sparcstation LX (http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_lx/ for more
info, a beautiful piece of hardware despite the fact that it sounds
like a lawnmower)
Software: NetBSD 3.0