> It's time for me to create a Zip disk that my SPARCstation can boot
> from.  Can I use a PC running NetBSD/i386 to produce this or am I
> likely to come up against byte-ordering issues?

Yes and maybe.  If the i386 box has SCSI, it should be possible.  You
may run into byte-sex issues, but they should all be fixable.

The biggest problem I would expect (besides the space crunch) is
getting a Sun-compatible label on the zipdisk.  I recall mrg fiddling
with stuff that looked aimed at allowing any port to write any other's
label format, which if it's made it into whatever your i386 box runs
may help.  If not, there's sunlabel
(ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/misc/mouse/sunlabel.*), which is what I'd
use.

> Even if I can't do a proper install this way, I would like to at
> least boot a kernel with a view to testing a 10baseT transceiver that
> arrived yesterday.

If you just want to smoke-test it, you don't need a kernel; "test net"
from the ok prompt should be enough.

> I'm also wondering whether to install 1.5.3 or 1.6, so I'd welcome
> people's thoughts or observations.

My thoughts are not of much help deciding between those two, so I shall
bow out of that part of the discussion.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B