[1800] in NetBSD-Development
NetBSD 1.3.2 on VirtualPC (on Milq)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeremy Daniel)
Thu Oct 8 21:17:37 1998
To: sipb-office@MIT.EDU
Cc: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1998 21:17:22 EDT
From: Jeremy Daniel <jdaniel@MIT.EDU>
I'd kinda like to see NetBSD athena be able to run on it so I'm Cc'ing
netbsd-dev on this. I'd be interested in working on it myself
eventually if nobody else is, but if someone has time in the near
future that would be good too.
How to use it:
* On the desktop there is a folder NetBSD. Open the folder and click
on the preferences for virtual PC and NetBSD will boot. (If you
just click on the VirtualPC it should use the default Preferences
which will get you Windows98).
* The root password under NetBSD has been set to the office root
password and I haven't created any local accounts.
* The Network and X seem to be correctly configured at first glance,
though X seems to have portions of windows off the screen when it
starts, and I'm not sure of the right way to end an Xsession. Also
it only has a 640x480 mode, so you won't get much size advantage.
* Warning: I've noticed that it seems to crash when I use "shutdown -h
now" but not the time I used "restart" and then quit the emulator.
This may be a fluke, but it's not mentioned in the docs (see below).
* The drive it's installed on is 350MB and I don't know of any good
way to grow it. The D: drive could easily be overwritten if people
want to install more software under NetBSD and there isn't room on
C:. (There is a utility that comes with VirtualPC for growing
drives but it appears to work only when they're dos formatted)
* I plugged back in the extended keyboard to try to switch between
virtual consoles, but I couldn't get that to work. feel free to
switch them back or something.
* I'm also not sure how fully functional the mouse is, but once you
start X you will need to depress the apple key to move the mouse out
of virtual PC's window.
How I installed it:
After spending a while making room on the mac, I installed NetBSD
1.3.2 under VirtualPC. The stock kernel under 1.3.2 doesn't support
the ethernet card emulation VirtualPC uses. With very little
searching I found a set of patches and install instructions developped
at the University of Melbourne in Australia. The patches and docs can
be found at http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/tsa/projs/vpcbsd.html, but I'll
briefly summarize the differences.
* Because standard boot disk doesn't support the card it is necessary
to install from another ms-dos drive "NetBSD Install tmp" currently
contains the install packages.
* Files from UMelbourne (everything else is standard 1.3.2):
+ kern.tgz
+ ld.so
+ XF86Config
* A quick comparison of the patches and corresponding files (in the
dev cell) showed some of them were modded from a slightly older
version than the ones distributed with 1.3.2.
* I'm hoping it would be mostly a simple matter of recompiling the
kernel and making new boot disks, but there's probably further
development that could happen if people are motivated.
* There are also notes on the porting they did at the end in case
linuxdev decides to be interested after 5.1 is released.
Jer
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeremy Daniel PGP key: finger jdaniel@monk.mit.edu
100 North Av Zephyr athena users over the web:
Natick, MA 01760 http://webzephyr.mit.edu/
