Today I finally got to install NetBSD on my VAXstation 2000.  It wasn't
an entirely pleasant experience.  I really have to complain about the
documentation that's available.  IT JUST PLAIN SUCKS!!!!!!

Now, before somebody takes offense, I'd like to say that I am not trying
to offend people.  Maybe that won't stop it from happening, but oh
well...  IMHO it is just a statement of fact.  Read on for my
justification.
If you're unable to maintain the documentation, at least state in it
that it is *hopelessly* out of date so I know.  I'd look at the source
instead.

Today I formatted the floppies on the VS2000, and then I catted the
images to them on my main Linux box.  Then I put in the floppy drive and
booted.  So far so good...  The VS2000 sure is fast with floppy drives,
and edlabel or boot load flawlessly

Then the trouble began.  References to ra(whatever) would just hang.  It
didn't even touch the drives.  I had to figure out I needed to refer to
mfm instead of ra by trial and error.

The disktab for the RD53 also confused me.  There are so many
overlapping seemingly pointless partitions.  Furthermore, the number of
cylinders seemed wrong.  It was 963 instead of 1024.  Sectors per track
should also have been 17 instead of 18.  Fortunately NetBSD itself was a
bit smarter, so it detected and corrected the errors.

Now I've finally managed to boot after seeing that the kernel is netbsd
and not gennetbsd.  It still refuses to write the boot sector though.

Anyways, now I'm reformatting the RD53 so that I have a fresh format to
work with (because I've heard they tend to lose the low level format
every couple of years).  After that, it's time to copy again.  Hopefully
I'll get a usable system someday.

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |