On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 10:36:39AM +0100, Steve Woodford wrote:

> Various older NetBSD ports have working tape installation using the
> trusty^Wcrusty shell-script install. See mvme68k, for an example.
Ahhh, hmmmm, ohhh. Who needs more than a single user shell with
the basic tools (disklabel, installboot, newfs, mount, ifconfig,
ping, ..., chmod, chown, mknod, ... cp, mv, mt, tar/pax, ...) for
installation? I mean, It can't be that hard to make a GENERIC 
kernel with an attached RAM disk containing this basic tools.
The existing RAM disk less sysinst would be good point to start.
Then put this RAM disk kernel with the right boot blocks onto 
a tape and behind that the dist-sets. So we can boot from tape 
to a single user shell, prepare the disk(s), move the tape to 
the first dist-set with mt, untar all we need, MAKEDEV, installboot
and the disk is ready to boot for the first time ... to single
user mode. The last step would be to do basic system configuration
(fstab, rc.conf, localtime, ...) and continue to boot to multi user 
mode. Quite simple and gives maximum power to the user. 
Or am I missing somthing here? 

Yes, I don't like sysinst and I avoid to use it where ever I can. 
-- 



tschüß,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/