> 	We often strive to do things `right'. I feel that this dooms
> us in the installation phase, because installation requires
> hackery. Every general solution we come up with will be stymed by
> something.

    "no general solution due to brain damage in the PC architecture"

That said, here's an evil thought. The complete set of 1.3.2 binary tarballs
is a little over 50 meg. Nearly everyone is going to want a swap partition
at least that big. Suppose we told people to do the following:

    1. Use DOS formatting and partitioning utilities to set up your HD like so:
	partition 1, sized to be NetBSD root
	partition 2, sized to be NetBSD swap or 55 megs, whichever is larger
	partition 3, DOS primary.
    2. Install whatever M$ stuff you need to access the distribution, and copy
	the tarballs onto a FAT filesystem in partition 2.
    3. Boot the "DOS bootstrap" NetBSD install floppy.
    4. let it mount -t msdos your 2nd partition, and create other partitions
	around it, and install them. geometry is already in the "doslabel".
    5. voila, c'est NetBSD.

Obviously this is geared heavily towards a full-disk installation.

> about doing this automatically - although perhaps someone could be
> inspired to create a tool that can extract the information we need
> from the Win95 installation, and allow us to get some leverage from
> the information.

Yes, something that automatically generated a report of which I/O ports
and IRQs were in use, and by who, would be very nice.

Hell, it would be useful to win95 users too! Last year when I was setting
my PC up I ran out of free IRQs (proved it by clicking through the whole
"Device Manager" hierarchy and taking notes), and I had to start disabling
IDE controllers (SCSI uber alles!!) and such. I still have to be careful
because certain win95 drivers crash if their IRQ number is being shared
with anyone else via PCI/PnP. It really is Plug and PRAY.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com