Thanks to all who made suggestions.  The system is
working now.  Some comments below for the archives.

--- Charles The Hawk <charlesthehawk@yahoo.com> wrote:
> However, when i run the Booter, i get the message
> "Bye-bye [blah, blah]" and the machine freezes.
> Heh, it certainly *shouldn't* be done like that.
This appears to be an out of memory problem.  It
looks like the SysInst method will not work with
only 8MB of RAM.  Perhaps the docs should say so
unless someone can confirm that it did work for them.

> I then tried the traditional method, but the Mac
> disk utilities [hfsutils] i use in Linux complained
> about every one of the mkfs files that i downloaded
> and wouldn't write them to the floppy.
I was able to find a copy of mkfs in the 1.6.1
tree that we could use.  After that, we were able
to follow the traditional method without any problems.

I couldn't figure out a way to repartition the drive
using the 7.5 Network Access Boot disk and didn't
know what other boot disk i could use.  The Mac
would always say the partition was in use and couldn't
be changed.  So, i booted on a 6.0.8(?) disk and was
able to initialize the drive and create a MacOS
partition.  I made it 20MB, but i think 10 might have
worked.  I had hoped to use a minimal MacOS and use
NFS, but since SysInst wouldn't work, i had to be
able to use a CD-ROM which increases the size
signficantly.  I *think* we could write out the
.tgz files to another SCSI drive and then probably
could use a minimal MacOS in about 2MB.

Next i created a A/UX partition that would be the
eventual NetBSD partition, leaving room for a
32MB swap partition.

Then i booted the 7.5 Network access disk and created
an additional Mac partition in the 32MB space and
copied all the 7.5.3 disks into it.  Using them i
installed 7.5.3 with CD-ROM support.  I then booted
7.5.3 and copied the Booter, Installer and Mkfs into
the base MacOS partition.  I ran Mkfs and converted
the A/UX partition.  I left the additional partition
alone in case i needed to change something in the
7.5.3 system.  Ran the Installer to install the .tgz
files off the CD-ROM.

Then, i booted off the 6.0.8 disks again to delete
the additional Mac partition and create an A/UX swap
partition in its place.  I might have been able
to convert it using Mkfs but didn't think about 
trying that until just now.  Booted 7.5.3 again and
used Mkfs to convert and initialize the swap
partition.

The system booted right up and we were able to
configure it without any problems.  We also have
debian working on another machine and are comparing
the 2 to see which we will go with for the other
machines.  If we decide on NetBSD, i will probably
try writing the .tgz files out to another hard drive
and install from it to free up some disk space.

Thanks again for all the help.
Charles


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