For the detailed install instructions....
Robert D. Billings
installing on B&W G3s.
Granted it may not be the best, but it is a starting point. Somebody can
flesh it out with how to
set the load address and what else may make sense at this point.
I agree that for first timers the current faq is terrible, and most people
aren't going to
sift through 2 years worth of mail postings trying to find that last little
detail needed to
install or boot the Mac they have infront of them. NetBSD has gotten much
better but there
still is a long way to go. (I wish I were more of a programmer so I could
help more.)
I hope somebody can put together a more complete how-to instructions to
start this process out.
The mac68k group has quite a few of those floating around that I still
occasionally reference. (Some
are a bit out dated, but make for a good starting point.)
Sorry for the typos in the originall post. I don't pretend to be a typist.
Rob
Date: 09/20/1999 20:02:36
I don't think that this information is in the FAQ yet, but it should be. If
you have a B&W G3 like I do and don't have it hooked to a network then
you've probably run into the delema of how to install NetBSD. The following
has worked for me, your mileage may vary. (This should work for any Mac
without a floppy and network connection.)
Download the distribution sets to a useful piece of media, I've used a ISO
9660 CDR.
Untar-zip the netbsd-GENERIC_MD.tgz file (make sure to use binary, some
programs I've found assume that if it is tgz it must be ascii. I don't know
why, go figure.)
Put the resulting netbsd-GENERIC_MD file in the root directory of your mac
boot volume. (If it is on the desktop just drop it onto your hard drive
icon.)
Reboot your mac and access Open Firm Ware, using command-option-O-F. Insert
the media with the distribution on it into the computer. At the OF prompt
type in <<boot:hd,5,netbsd-GENERIC_MD>> (of course the <<and>> are not
typed.) At this point your computer should start to boot into NetBSD. Try
and pay attention to what it maps your drives to. The internal ATA drive
will probably be wd0, wd1 is there if you have a slave. Your CD will
probably map go cd0 and the Zip to sd0, Again your mileage may vary.
Once booted you might want to type a none printing character such as shift
key, this bug has reportedly been fixed in current but the 1.4 and 1.4.1
distribution still has it. (Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, especially if
this ends up in the FAQ!) You should then be able to follow the simple
instructions on installing the system.
Once the NetBSD has been installed you still have one last thing to do.
Since the latest version of OF won't recognize the bootblock information
that up till now NetBSD has used to make the disk bootable without going
into OF you have work around this. This is done by placing the kernel you
want to boot in the root partition of your Mac HD and boot it like you did
the MD kernel.
There apparently is a way to write "macros" for OF where I suppose you
could write a macro to execute immediately on power up and boot to avoid
interaction with OF. If someone is successful in doing this please post it
for the rest of us to enjoy.
I hope that this has been of some help to someone, and that others may
share the information that they have learned on installing on other systems
not well documented in the FAQ.
By the way, if you have an Adaptec PowerDomain 2930 at this point NetBSD
will not boot. I believe that a fix to this is in the works. Since my wife
uses my Jaz drives I won't be removing mine for now. When the fix is in
I'll use it.
Rob
John Klos
First, thanks for all of the replies. I can see that there are lots of
people who care about seeing this stuff work.
Now I need to ask a specific question: is there a kernel out there with a
miniroot filesystem for install? If so, where can I d/l it from?
Simple issue: there is no d/l install kernel for 1.4.2 except for what is
on the boot.fs floppy. There should be. Then we can figure out the
simplest way to use open firmware and / or ofwboot to boot.
Thanks much,
John Klos
Mohan Khurana
for the 1.4.2 version. I decided to use netbsd-current as a result of
that, which apparently does have the necessary files. I also read
somewhere that booting a netbsd kernel that is gzip'd shouldn't be a
problem.
From what I understand, the ofwboot* files just get the netbsd kernel file
loaded. As to which netbsd kernel file it loads, it was said by Henry
Hotz that:
'setenv boot-device cd:' and 'setenv boot-file netbsd.ram'
will load netbsd.ram after the ofwboot.elf file is loaded. I'm still a
little unclear about what ofwboot.xcf does... any idea?
mohan
Henry B. Hotz
>will load netbsd.ram after the ofwboot.elf file is loaded. I'm still a
>little unclear about what ofwboot.xcf does... any idea?
ofwboot is a bootstrap loader which (unlike OF) understands gzipped
&/or elf kernels and ffs filesystems. Frequently it's loaded by
bootxx which knows nothing about anything except raw OF sector IO,
and has the sectors of ofwboot hard-coded into it by installboot.
Alternately the ofwboot.xcf version of ofwboot can be loaded directly
by OF versions that understand xcoff from a filesystem type that OF
understands and it will then load the elf kernel from the ffs root
filesystem.
Different versions of OF understand different degrees of what we'd
like to use. We want to have a /netbsd file in a netbsd-native
filesystem type. We have lots of tools to get there from lots of
starting points, but it really hasn't settled out yet and is pretty
confusing.
Signature failed Preliminary Design Review.
Feasibility of a new signature is currently being evaluated.
h.b....@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbh...@oxy.edu
Henry B. Hotz
>Are there any more tests I can run? Can someone help fill in the blanks
>here? What are the options one can use at the "Boot:" prompt? Any idea
>why the file "netbsd" is found by the boot code but can't be found by
>either of the boot loaders?
Don't know about the other questions, but from reading the ofwboot
code what you type at the Boot: prompt is exactly what you would put
in the boot-file OF environment variable.
It can be:
exit to return from ofwboot back to OF
-{a|s|d}[a|s|d...] for ask, single-user, and debug options.
filename[ a|s|d...] boot file followed by optional options.
All options should be in a single word. If the file can't be found
then the ask option is turned on and the Boot: prompt repeated. The
input from that prompt resets all options. Obviously it doesn't make
sense to say -s with no filename, but the parsing works.
I think filename could be a full path if the version of OF on that
machine supports it on the filesystem type you are booting from. The
boot device, including the partition number is not input at the Boot:
prompt.
Actually looking back through the code I don't see a reference to
boot-file. Hmmm. I think what I said is otherwise true, I'm just
not sure where to can this info into OF variables for non-interactive
use anymore.