Also I asked it to create just / and swap - no separate /usr.
   I think that worked but the screen clears and then you get the nice:
   
   "if you see any errors above - abort now"
   
   message at the top of the screen :-)  A little worrying.


actually, i found that when i told the alpha sysinst not too hvae a /usr
buy giving it a 0 size when asked how large it should be.  this appeared
to work, as the filesystem/partition menu did not show a /usr partition
when asking if this layout was OK.  but when it came to newfs time, it
tried to newfs a partition with zero size, resulting in a fatal error.

i continued installing by hand at this point :-)


how did you tell it not to use a /usr ?