I had a go at installing "1.2-release" at the weekend.  All went fairly well,
but there were a few low points:

* !HForm as shipped with RISC OS 3.5 can't cope with a 3.8G drive at all
  (it falls over with "Number too big") even though I only wanted a 10M
  RISC OS partition.

  Solution: fetch hformbeta.arc from ftp.acorn.co.uk and *remove the
  RMEnsure line from !Run* which demands RISC OS 3.6 (it probably can't
  create a partition >512M under RISC OS 3.5, but that doesn't matter to
  many of us.

  BTW, a 10M RISC OS partition appears to be about right for the stuff in
  bootloader.arc plus a few kernels.

* Make sure you don't dislodge the metal clips holding in the floppy and
  existing hard drives.  I knocked off the floppy one and as a result
  trashed a floppy trying to write a rootdisk with a vibrating drive.

* I can't boot into 800x600 (which my monitor can certainly cope with) or
  1024x768 (which I think works).  640x480 works OK.  What I get it the
  higher resolution modes is the character set wrapped round about half a
  character + random coloured garbage at the bottom of the screen.  I
  managed to set up my partitions like this (before discovering 640x480
  worked) so it looks like just the display is corrupted.

  Solution: Dunno.  Looking at the mailing list archives, I found a few
  mentions of problems like this, but no solutions.  Someone commented
  that it appeared to make a difference what desktop mode you started
  from (mine is 800x600 and probably 256 colours).  I'll check if this
  helps tonight.

Otherwise it was fairly painless.  The beta installation instructions are
out of date in a lot of places, but it's usually obvious what to do.  My
only real complaint is that inst seems to need lower case names for the
sets, whereas they end up in upper case if you copy them from a CD-ROM or
DOS floppy using UnixFS (or in mixed case if you use my SpecialCase module).

Oh yes, and the "patch12-<n>" sets' names don't fit in 8.3 which is also
unhelpful (bah, why doesn't RISC OS have LFN or Rock Ridge support?)

I've not tried X yet though.

Oh, another grubby tip: you can use UnixFS on RISC OS 3.5 on a partition
which straddles the 512K mark, but it splurges errors when you fill up
past 512K (I discovered this by mounting the wrong drive).

BTW, I've set up a searchable index of the mailing list archive (since I
couldn't find one on www.netbsd.org and wanted one).  It could do with some
more work (I just used our web site indexer product), but I'm meant to be
doing a version of this for mail and news, so it should be improved in the
next few weeks.  Anyway, for now:

http://noxious.muscat.co.uk/riscbsd/

(I took all the packaged archives from ftp.netbsd.org so it may not be
completely up to date).

Cheers,
Olly