John Wittkoski wrote,

Someone else on the list mentioned something about the size of your swap.
How much swap do you have?

        --John
---
I have 20 Megs swap, with 10Megs real RAM. I've noticed now that the problem with 
the clear command usually only strikes after the file system is mounted (fstab seems
correct, and I use both 'mount -a' and 'mount -u /' with no difference in performance).

When I say usually, I mean that even before mounting the clear command can hang, and
this seems dependent on the commands immediately before it but I haven't 'triangulated'
the dependencies here.

Also, when I do 'man <anything>', what I actually get in that instance is 'panic: kernel
jump to zero' plus a trap code (I'll try to note it next time :) on the last line AND
the first line of the manual page!

This seems to suggest the screen sizing thing is what's at fault (and remember in the 
early bootstrap, the console is operating as a strict tty (is it not?), simply bumping
up line after line of output, rather than writing to a dimensional space. As it rather
still looked like a terminal config error, I also tried...

...using the 'stty rows <x>' command -- I did this a couple days ago, before I received
today's list. Given what you said about the screen supposedly being wrong size for memory,
I can make a little more sense of the result of that experiment: when I used 'rows 48'
(which the standard display is, with that obnoxiously funky font we have to use) or 
'stty rows 47', there is no change -- but when I tried a randomly larger number ('stty
rows 100', actually) I seemed to be able to use the clear command more often, but 'full-
screen' operations had the same errors as before. That didn't seem totally logical,
but now it does somewhat. What is the exact number of lines we THINK is suppose to be
on this size of monitor? and p.s. what are the correct number of columns?

I'm overjoyed to have NetBSD operating on my system -- and I do consider it a 'working
port' -- but this problem, which seems as though it could be overcome through file
configuration, has me vexed. Since I'm not good enough with ex to do without vi, and
haven't access to man pages, the only real bootstrapping failure that remains is my
ability to work through this problem...with only 40 some lines in which to operate
before a lockup, I really think we should call THIS implementation "BSD Lite" ... :)