Hey all,

Recently installed NetBSD 1.5.3 on an old Quadra 650. Pretty good!
Excellent job guys!

One thing I'd like to point out, however, is what I consider an easier way
to go through the installation which I did not see covered in the
installation guide.

I somewhat groaned at the idea of installing everything in MacOS, and not
through the venerable 'sysinst' tool. What I did notice in the
installation directory was an install image, so I proceeded to boot that.
Lo and behold, we've sysinst.

So my procedure basically entailed:

1. Backing up some essential MacOS utilities to floppy disk, just in case
the installation didn't quite go smoothly. Note the existing install was
MacOS 7.5.5.

2. Writing the Network Access Disk provided by Apple to a floppy.

3. Wrote the NetBSD/mac68k utilities to a floppy. Additionally if you've
no existing installation, you'll want the install image on another floppy,
though the booter just might fit on there as well.

4. Restarted MacOS with extensions off.

5. Booted the install image, and proceeded to create three partitions:
sd0d/4M/HFS, sd0a/200M/NetBSD Root, sd0b/32M/NetBSD Swap

6. Proceeded with a net install via NFS.

7. Rebooted with the Network Access Disk, formatted the HFS partition and
copied the System Folder from the NAD to the HD.

8. Rebooted from the HD, and copied the Booter from floppy.

9. Booted with the default options. After I was sure it was working, into
the Startup Folder it went with the autoboot option set.

I'm sure that everyone here knows all about the above, but the install
guide seems to have the majority of the installation in MacOS itself.
This, of course, requires a CD-ROM, AppleTalk setup or existing
installation of MacOS.

As is the usual case when working with Macs, one tends to require a
working Mac system or a buddy with a Mac in order to get things started.
While you can write HFS floppies from a PC (or access FAT floppies from
MacOS with the appropriate extension, which takes space on the floppy of
course), I find it much easier to deal with floppy images. This doesn't
require another working Mac, and can be done from a Wintel machine, a
Linux system, or whatever else you happen to have handy.

Done right, this method requires only two (maybe three) floppies: The NAD
(which basically has a couple bytes of header data that you can strip away
and then use with dd) and a NetBSD Install Floppy with the Booter and the
Install image (with 1.5.3 this might be a tight fit, but I notice for 1.6
it's a touch smaller). Perhaps one exists already, but if not here's an
idea! Of course I could just make one available for all...

Hopefully the above bit will be of use to someone.

Have a good one!

-- 
"It does not upset me to be 'thirteen at | eric@oddity.ca
table' unless there is only food enough  | http://www.oddity.ca/
for a dozen." - Grimod de la Reyniere    | ECSL - What conspiracy?