Subject: Well, I *wanted* to say that my pc532 lived!
To: None <port-pc532@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
List: port-pc532
Date: 10/09/1995 20:57:47
Following my recent move from Ireland, my ship, as they say, finally
came in and disgorged some 20 cubit feet of crap that I'd accumulated
over close to a decade of European living. Jesus, I can't believe I'm
hauling some of this stuff around! Anyway, I digress.. The point was
that one of the things disgorged was my pc532, secure in its little
`Computer Bauerhaus' case, and ready to finally power up back in its
ancestral home. Tonite, I picked out a suitable place of honor
between my two FreeBSD development stations, switched the 220V switch
to 115V with what I'd like to say were trembling fingers but weren't,
and plugged it in. "Fzzzzzzzzz...." An anemic fizzing from the power
supply and not so much as a fan turning. Feh! I guess that "dual
rated" power supply simply wasn't! So much for my planned "my pc532
lives!" message! :-(
So now I need to go out and get a 110V PC power supply, but once I do
I'm sure that it will power up just fine.. So then that leads to the
next Interesting Problem, namely getting the OS onto the disk!
For a variety of reasons, I'd really rather not deal with taking the
drive out of its case and trying to kludge up something with one of my
development systems for populating the drive. I know, it would be a
LOT easier to simply set it all up in advance on one of my FreeBSD
boxes and then move the drive over, but trust me - that's a painful
prospect right now. If it took 3 days to download the entire shlorp
from one spot on my FreeBSD box over a serial cable to the pc532, that
would be just fine! I'm not in a hurry so much as I am unwilling to
create any more perturberation to my current computing setup than an
attached serial cable to the pc532 and some space on an existing
partition somewhere.
That means that I'm *very* interested in any installation solutions
folks might have involving serial downloaded installation tools, or
whatever. Can I download an installation utility using the ROM
download feature that will allow me to partition and setup the hard
drives and then perhaps suck the rest of the distribution over SLIP?
[Really hoping I get a "yes" :-)]
Jordan
P.S. There aren't many of us left, are there? What 10 working pc532s,
max?