Hi!

I have a friend who has problems with NetBSD. He has a Mac IIci and has been
asking for my help for weeks now, but I don't know much and we thought about
sending these questions to you. I wish you could unveil at least a couple of
these problems so that he could get his software working.

Here's his post in entirety (which I translated so blame my bad English):


At first here's my machinery: Mac IIcx, 8MB RAM and a Quantum Lightning 349MB
hard disk (in a separate casing, ID 6) containing the NetBSD/68k software. 
(And yes, I have installed the correct version for 68k Macs.)

A)
Why doesn't the login prompt appear when I boot into Linux in the single user
mode? It just keeps asking "Enter pathname of shell or return for sh" and I
answer /bin/sh. Is that the correct path?

Then the #-mark appears. Do I have to login again with the login command? If I
try "login root", then it asks the type of terminal (vt220), presents a message
and then "Don't login as root, use su."  But when I type "mail" the machine
just says "no mail for root". Well, does the "Login:" prompt have to appear
after bootup, or just that #-mark? Do the mac's networking capabilities have to
be installed prior to bootup?

Why can't I use mkdir to create new directories in for example root's home
directory? Or in anywhere else? It just presents me with message "permission
denied".

Is my installation correct after all or have I screwed up something?

B)
Where are the definitions for search paths, user characteristics etc? For
example adduser and mkdir won't work. 

C)
Which are the mailing lists for 68k mac users? I would like to mail a few
questions there, too.

I ask for a quick response for I have struggled with this problem for a few
weeks now... I'm desperate, so to say.

To be continued:

I found out that when I boot up NetBSD, it won't mount sd2a which contains root
but it changes root device to sd9a ?-o. 

I inspected the file /etc/fstab.sd which should mount partitions but it reads
that root is /dev/sd0a, swap is /dev/sd0b etc. Is that a preference for MacOS
and NetBSD being on the same physical disk. And when I boot into NetBSD it
makes whole system read-only so I cannot make any changes, invoke adduser or
mkdir etc. How could I transfer files from NetBSD's partitions to MacOS's?

I tried to use installer to unmount sd2a and mount sd9a instead but unmount
didn't work... What's the correct syntax for unmount? Which ID number
corresponds to that sd9? Perhaps if we could make the ID match that sd9, we
could make it work, too? Strange still, Installer insists with disklabel that
that hard disk is sd2, but when I boot up it finds it as sd9... ?-o
How could I unmount sd2a and mount sd9a instead?

How to install the whole software in a physically separate disk? I thought
about taking MacOS hard disk off the bus but how could I boot into Linux then?


Esa Kivelä

email: Esa_Kivelä@fimug.fi