Re: NetBSD install experiences

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hi,


Torbjörn Granlund wrote:
> Please consider working on the NetBSD install experience!  Now even I,
> who is far from a newbie and have tons of patience, consider giving up.
> If this had been my first experience with NetBSD, I would have given up
> long before I had arrived to ISSUE 5, I'm afraid.

I just did a fresh install of NetBSD 9.0 release on a Sun Netra and an
amd64 laptop as well as an upgrade on several i386 laptops and
SPARCStations.

All-in all, I found, if there are no hardware support issues, the
install experience quite fine and "upgrade" even more.
Upgrading my i386 laptop was a piece of cake. CD, network cable in,
upgrade, reboot run pkgin and upgrade everything. Wow!

Install on the amd64 laptop was similar: I did easy partitioning (whole
disk) and it went out smooth.
On the Sun Netra server, almost the same experience, install and
partition was smooth, only bninary packges failed because pkgin is not
available (but all other packages I needed yes, so isntaleld them
manually with pkg_add)

Only on some SPARCstations I had issues with the partitioning, because
the disks were already partitioned... I was unable to overwrite them,
changing them was difficult and even got a segfault of the partitioner.
Not being interested in data, i dd'ed to zero the first blocks and redid
from scratch, then it  worked.

So, yes... that is the delicate part... (but is almost for every OS I tried)

Riccardo