Hi! Yesterday I started trying to beat netbsd/mac 1.2 into submission, but
it doesn't want to go easily. I'm experiencing several strange problems,
and I'd love to have some help.

First off, my setup:

I've got a Quadra 610 (68LC040, yes) with twelve megs of RAM. I'm letting
NetBSD live on an 80 meg hard drive, broken down into a sixteen meg swap
partition and a sixty-some meg root partition. I used Apple HD SC to
partition the beastie, and then mkfs to format the root partition.

I'm installing:

netbsd.SBC_11.tar.gz (or) GENERIC-9
man12
etc12
comp12
base12

The processor cache settings don't seem to matter (?), and I'm making sure
the thing is in one-bit graphics mode.

When I boot, I get problems during the automated file suck. It tells me
strange tales of incorrect numbers of free blocks and other things. This
happens with a completely fresh, clean system. (The only thing I didn't do
was format the drive in question before letting mkfs format it - is that
necessary?)

Also, once I've actually booted, I get a fair number of segmentation
faults. They seemingly come at random.

One thing I can definitely reproduce every time is this: When I run vi and
try to save a working file with ZZ, I get an error telling me that the file
doesn't exist. When I try to cat the file, I get nothing. Further, and more
bothersome, when I try to ls in the directory where the file was, I get
nothing. Having tried that, when I pwd, I get an error about an illegal
instruction. This only happens with directories in which I've tried to edit
a file. It works fine in untouched directories.

Let's see... Ah. gcc gives me random "can't find this or that library"
errors when I run it. This doesn't happen consistently, and I can sometimes
coax it into finishing something for me, but it's not a happy program.

Oh. Another note. After having vi fail to operate, I tried just catting a
"hello world" program into a file, but it didn't seem to save what I gave
it consistently.

Is this a sign of kernal instability, or does something else present itself?

If anyone could shed some light on all of this, I'd be greatly
appreciative. I'd love to get a NetBSD setup going. I'm not terribly
experienced with administering Unix systems, but I've got enough experience
so that I can probably follow any advice given. I'll happily answer any
questions that could help provide information that might get my setup
working.

Two last questions: How usable is X right now? I haven't snagged it yet,
since I figured it would be best to get a stable system running first, but
I'd like to use it when things do straighten out. Also, has anyone done any
work on LocalTalk drivers? I'd love to set my Quadra up as a NetBSD machine
and have it serve news, mail, and possibly some sort of TCP service to a
small LocalTalk net.

Thanks in advance for the help. If I get up and running, I'll try to start
contributing code to the project.

--
        Mason Loring Bliss   /\   mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
      PGPKeyID: 0x25B3D5B5  /()\  Mason_Bliss@p6.f370.n109.z1.fidonet.org
http://www.four.net/~mason /    \ A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat.