>> I have tried unsuccessfully many times to get the available kernels to boot
>> on my 160, but I never even get out of the booter.  It just hangs after
>> printing out all the environment variables.
>
>1.  Which booter?

OK, I should have given more specifics.  Sorry.  First of all, I have tried
several booters, including 1.8, 1.9 and 1.9.1.  I usually use 1.9.1.  Anyway, I've
tried a few new variations on booting since then, and have learned a few things.
First of all, my PB160 ALWAYS hangs in the booter at the end of the environment
variables IF the serial port is set for the modem.  If it is set for the printer
port, the Generic-5 kernel from Puma actually gets out of the booter.  So does a
custom kernel from ftp://ghpc8.ihf.rwth-aachen.de/pub/NetBSD/netbsd.960206.  The
other kernels (Generic-6, Generic-2, and netbsd11-patched (all from Puma)) all
fail on either port.

On the two kernels that get out of the booter on the printer port, they both hang
in the same place.  The screen blanks, and the following messages appear:

     [ preserving 89381 bytes of netbsd symbol table ]
     Bootstraping NetBSD /mac68k
     Getting mapping from MMU.

     *** HANG ***

That's the message from the Generic-5 kernel.  The custom kernal also hangs
at the MMU mapping, but it says that it's preserving 91292 bytes of the netbsd
symbol table.

Is the MMU in the 68030 used in the PB160 different from the MMU in the other
100 series PBs?  Is this causing the problem?  Can anyone fix this?

>> 3) Is there a way to test kernels from the Mac partition w/o downloading
>> the whole distribution or setting up an AUX partition (if none of the kernels
>> will even work, I don't want to go through the trouble of doing this)?
>
>In the booter, there's an option to boot from a kernel in the mac
>filesystem.  It should be on the right hand side at the top.  Just be sure
>to specify the name of the kernel -- and I guess put it in the same
>directory as the booter, unless you give it the whole
>Macintosh%20HD::booter:netbsd
>
>or whatever.  If you don't have a good gzip program and tar program,
>you'll need to get those, as most of the kernels are .tgz.

I thought I was doing this part right, and I was.  I DID have the option to boot
from the MacOS set in the Booter.  Since it hadn't worked, I thought I might be doing
something wrong, but as I mentioned, my lack of success getting out of the booter
seem more related to the serial port problems I mentioned earlier than anything else.

>> 4) If it is not already possible, is any one working on kernel support for the
>> 100 series PBs (even those w/o FPU)?  What about native ADB so it wouldn't
>> need the serial boot?
>
>Let's see... I believe Allen Briggs has his 145 working, though mine never
>did.  I may try now that I have the new internal HD and some FP emulation
>kernels.
>
>Don't know about the ADB.
>
>> 5) This is a non-sequitor, but I've wondered for a long time; what are "sups?"
>> (Obviously, I'm not an old school BSD hack but everyone always talks about
>> everything being "supped" from this or that site).  I assume it stands for
>> suppliments or something like that, but is there a more complete definition
>> that I'm missing?
>
>I think it's either source update or system update or something of the
>like.  Regardless, some people like to compile kernels for one reason or
>another.  They keep their own copy of the source code and then run sup,
>which automatically updates their sources to match the current master
>tree, only loading the files that have changed since their last sup
>(_much_ faster than ftp in the long run :-).

Thanks for the help.  If anyone can help me get any further with this, I will
show them no end of appreciation.

Thanks again,

-Adam