[305] in NetBSD-Development
Installation notes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Thu Dec 22 13:46:51 1994
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 1994 13:43:58 -0500
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
I finally have my system to the point where I can run xlogin and log
in. I don't have outgoing MH mail working yet, and a few things are
broken because I only have X11R6 libs (I've rebuilt ctwm, and am
working on the sipb locker now). Also, I'm getting garbage (high-bit
characters) in my virtual terminals until I enter a username and
password, at which point it looks fine, except it tends to think that
my screen is twelve lines long.
My system takes up 80MB, including 10MB for X (minimal installation, I
can't build anything yet) and 23MB for a full kernel build in
/usr/src. So the system isn't very big (although 23MB is awfully
large for a kernel build tree resulting in a 700K kernel).
The default installation leaves you with a really crippled setup: you
can't load kernel modules, you have no ptys, and you have one virtual
console. Getting your system up to a usable state involves grabbing
the kernel source and building your own kernel. Perhaps for
installation purposes, we should build some kernels similar to
granola's (one for aha and one for blt, if we can't make one that
works for both) and use them as our installation kernels, assuming we
do custom Athena install disks.
Unless someone else wants to put in a lot of work, incidentally, I
don't think we're going to have custom Athena install disks before the
NetBSD class. So I'm going to focus on making it easy to install with
the existing tools, and coming up with a handout that supplements the
installation notes.
There's also this problem that NetBSD doesn't currently autodetect
Etherlink III cards unless you've done a cold boot. granola and
glacier fix this by hard-wiring the location of the 3c509 in the
kernel (there's no standard location; glacier and granola use
different I/O base addresses for the card). Short of providing two
kernel binaries for every standard Etherlink III positioning, I'm not
sure if there's a good answer to this besides telling people "cold
boot your machine or grab the kernel sources and rebuild".
