On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 11:05:51PM -0800, mneptok wrote:
> 
> Second, as I have no CD drive for this thing, it looks like a sysinst 
> is my lot. Not a huge deal, as being an OpenBSD user I (think I) have a 
> fairly strong grasp of network *BSD installs. Any NetBSD and/or 68K 
> specific issues of which I should be aware? Caveats on what to do at 
> the start to save headaches later that would not occur to someone new 
> to NetBSD/68K, but not Unix-like OS stuffs?

You do not *have to* use sysinst.  The "traditional install" lets you
install sets from AppleShare volumes (if you have another Macintosh,
setting up AppleTalk is trivial) and/or HFS partitions.  Shrinking an
HFS partition without losing data is problematic at best, so you are
better off creating a separate "exchange" partition (or, more
awkwardly, putting a temporary HFS filesystem on a partition you
intend for swap).  Once you have installed base.tgz and etc.tgz, you
can install other sets and packages from within NetBSD.

On the other hand, although I have not been too impressed with
sysinst, it needs to be used in order to be improved, so you could be
on higher moral ground by using it!

Plan on quickly installing the libhfs and hfsutils packages.

When it comes to an exchange partition, the partition type should be
Apple_HFS so that MacOS will see it, but the filesystem can be
something else like VFAT.  (The hfsutils package is fairly reliable,
but the NetBSD kernel does not have hfs support even as a module.)

> Third, the little Q605 has a pathetically small 160MB drive. I plan to 
> test NetBSD and this machine with that drive, then upgrade to something 
> larger. Larger enough so that MacOS 8.1's support for larger volumes 
> becomes an issue. Or does it? Can 7.5.x slice a chunk off a drive too 
> big for it to recognize in its entirety, leaving free space for the 
> NetBSD drive tools to work? I assume that NetBSD's disk tools are not 
> inhibited by any disk limitations of the host MacOS. So, long question 
> longer, on an 18GB drive, would I need to boot from and install MacOS 
> 8.1, or could I still use 7.5.x?

I really don't know how the different MacOS versions respond to large
hard drives.  If I were you, I would prefer to have two hard drives,
and try to keep MacOS off the large one.  (Then, instead of worrying
about downgrade to MacOS 8.1, you could start looking at upgrading to
7.1, and then hoping to move it to floppy....)  This does not really
purport to answer your question, but neither is it intended to start
an argument, it is just something else to think about.

-- 
John