Hi there :-)

Background:
I've been using NetBSD/mac68k on my Q840AV pretty much since support 
was added, and have been using NetBSD/alpha on my AS200 4/166 for 
about 4 years. I decided to throw NetBSD onto a spare 2.5" hard drive 
that I have for my PowerBook 3400 (my other PPC is a 7200...missed it 
by *that* much).


Installation:
Installation wasn't *too* bad, but I had to go around some of 
Sysinst's issues. I burned an ISO9660 CD with the snapshot tarballs, 
& then proceeded to boot from the floppy module with an external CDRW 
connected. It booted fine, so I went into sysinst. I got through the 
partitioning OK (a single root and swap...no usr) & went on to select 
the sets that I had downloaded (everything but xcomp and comp). When 
I exited from there, it told me that it couldn't be completed because 
kern.tgz wasn't part of the sets. Well, that's because I took the 
kernel from the sets directory & it was named kern-GENERIC.tgz 
(which, incidentally wouldn't show up as that on an 8.3 ISO). When I 
told it to ignore the error & install the other sets, it threw up a 
sh*tload of file system full errors (until I cmd-c'd), as if wd0a was 
never mounted on /mnt. Well, I'm used to bypassing sysinst, as it 
didn't exist when I installed onto my other systems, so I exited & 
proceeded to make sure wd0a was mounted on /mnt, and that the CD was 
mounted on /mnt2. I copied everything from the CD onto the hard drive 
& unpacked the tarballs with "tar --unlink -zxpf blah.tgz" (yeah, 
unlink's not necessary, but it's a habit ;-). Then I tried to boot & 
got default-catch. My guess is that I had no partition zero 
bootlader. I booted from the floppy again & mounted the wd0a...cd'd 
into /mnt/usr/mdec & tried ./installboot to see the parameters. It 
wasn't clear to me what exactly went where in what order, between 
ofwboot, ofwboot.xcf and bootxx. Only the third argument was clear 
(device). I went to my alpha and typed man installboot. The alpha 
only requires two arguments. But it told me where the man page was, 
and I had installed the man pages onto the PowerBook. cd 
/mnt/usr/share/man/cat8/macppc...ls...hmm, no installboot.0. Ugh. 
There is no man page for installboot. And yet the FAQ has a link to 
http://www.tac.eu.org/cgi-bin/man-cgi?installboot+8.macppc+NetBSD-current 
which is now a dead link. OK, new try. I burned another ISO, this 
time renaming the kernel's tarball to kern.tgz. This time, it 
complained that there was no kern-GENERIC.tgz. This is getting 
amusing now. Mind you, it still complains even if I don't have kern 
selected in sysinst, as that is a required package...and still, that 
missing requirement seems to stop wd0a from being mounted on /mnt, as 
it keeps giving me filesystem full messages when it tries to ignore & 
move on. OK, final try. I de-selected *all* packages & told it to 
move on...hoping that this would negate the filesystem full crap. 
This time it did seem to be doing stuff. Since I didn't even put in 
etc, the setting up of password & stuff failed...but it *did* do the 
installboot for me! One other shortcoming of the sysinst is that it 
doesn't seem to be able to read a disklabel. I often tried telling it 
to use the existing partitions, but it always just showed a wd0c 
partition, with no "a" or "b", so every time I would have to re-tell 
it that I wanted custom partition, 1278M wd0a, and 99M wd0b. At any 
rate, after doing that, I could then copy everything to the hard 
drive & unpack successfully. I then got it to boot correctly into 
netbsd :-). I did a mount -a to change /etc/rc.conf but suddenly vi 
disappeared, even though it was there 10 seconds earlier to tell me 
that the part was read-only (which I knew)...I needed to just mount 
-rw / since I hadn't modified the fstab yet & it still showed a wd0g 
partition :P. So after I modified both fstab and rc.conf, I was up in 
multi-user :-). In all, it took a couple hours, including taking the 
powerbook apart whenever I wanted to switch OSes. I wanna get one of 
the MCE media bay cases for a hard drive, so that I can have both 
OSes in the machine at once...the case isn't designed to be taken 
apart as routinely as I am.


Now here are my operating quirks...

I'm experiencing the non-automatic boot where I must specify the root 
device & stuff...I'll have to hard-code my kernel when I build one.

Next, a question regarding the built-in ethernet and modem. The 3400 
actually uses a combo PCI card for the modem and ethernet. I didn't 
happen to see anything resembling the modem passing in my dmesg, so 
the secondary function may not be supported. Additionally, I see 
tlp0, so I assume that's the card's ethernet function. When I 
ifconfig the interface to be up (whether or not a network is 
attached), I get the following constantly until I ifconfig down and I 
can't telnet to my other NetBSD machines:

tlp0: filter setup and transmit timeout

This is with the Dec 21 snapshot. I'll probably try turning out a 
kernel in a few days, with de* instead of tlp* to see if that behaves 
any better, but would welcome any other advice. Worst case scenario I 
have a few PCMCIA cards with Ethernet as well as modem, so I'm not 
overly concerned.

Thanks,
Mike
-- 
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.