Hi Mark,

As a man-of-very-little-experience, I have successfully installed NetBSD 
on my strongarm RiscPC. bb_riscbsd is the bootblock thingamajigger. It 
pops the NetBSD stuff at the beginning of the NetBSD section of your 
drive. The first trick I missed was running the short obey file that 
assigns the filetypes to everything else in the acorn part of the distro.

Do that, and then run bb_riscbsd, and then answer all the difficult 
questions about your HDD geometry and where you want bsd to start on the 
drive...

ALSO! Beware that the hinty device gets it wrong if your HDD is too large 
unless a) things have changed since I did it, or b) I actually mean 
there's a problem with !Format (or !Form or !Whatever). What I actually 
mean is that IIRC at some point along the way I was handed a negative 
number instead of a large number that would really have helped me know 
where to put the boot block and then Patrick (maybe he posts here every 
now and again) helped me work it out on paper.

It was a while ago, and my memory is not serving me too well.

On the upside X was largely preconfigured, and so a doddle.

-L

On Sat, 20 May 2006, Mark Smith wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm struggling a bit here on getting NetBSD to install on a StrongARM RiscPC 
> ... the main trouble is the horrible documentation :-(
>
> I've got the NetBSD 3.0 CD and I've printed out the INSTALL.PS file, and I've 
> even read as far as section "Running bb_riscbsd" ... and this is where I get 
> stuck .. what is "bb_riscbsd" ?!?
>
> Then there is a "!BtNetBSD" ... that just locks up my machine with a "Bye 
> from RISC OS" message and also "Boot32" gives me the same message.
>
> Is NetBSD for Acorn32 just a cruel joke to tempt me ? :-(
>
> Or am I better of just binning this RiscPC ?  I was quite hoping to have it 
> as a light weight unixish machine as I don't want to spend money on getting 
> RISC OS 4 ROMs.
>
> Any kind souls able to help out ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Mark
>
> PS I forgot to mention I had to rename the CD so that it would even be 
> accepted by RISC OS, don't make life easy do they ? :-)