On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Timothy Stark wrote:

> However, my copy is Hobbyist Edition that does not support Ethernet and some
> functions.  How do I install NetBSD 1.4.2 on it without netboot?

Good questions :-)  I've just grabbed a copy of this cause it looks pretty
interesting.  Although they don't support ethernet interfaces, they do
support 8 serial lines via an emulated DHV11.  With NetBSD/vax we should
be able to run a PPP network connection over this.

I've not looked at any of this closely enough yet, but I'm assuming that
under the Linux version of the emulator the DHV11 lines map to physical
serial ports.  This would imply that you'd be limited to speed of those
ports on your PC.  However, I'm thinking you should be able to bind the
emulated DHV11 ports to pseudo terminals under Linux which will actually
carry traffic over the Linux ethernet connection.  So you'd be tunneling
PPP over ethernet.  

There would be a performance hit, but it might work.  This doesn't solve
the netboot issue, but it would at least allow NetBSD/vax to have network
access on the emulated VAX.

For installation, I'd imagine we'd have to build some sort of disk image
that the emulator would be happy using.  Figuring that out, we could make
a clean install and distribute that like we do the CD-ROM images.

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
                    BRAKE YOOR BRANE: WWW.KIBO.COM