Re: 9.1 install comments

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 06:52:57AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
>      Matthias' technical contributions are too many to list here
> [...]
>      was especially active in keeping some of our most weired
>      ancient VME architectures in shape.
> 
> "weired"?

weird english spelling rules ;-)

Will remove the whole section though, new releases are not 9.0 anymore.

>      The amd64 binary distribution sets are distributed as
>      gzipped tar files named with the extension .tar.xz (e.g.,
>      base.tar.xz).
> 
> Are they gzipped or xzed?

Good point, what is the proper word? There are tons of references to "gzipped"
in the install docs, independend of the actually used format - we need to make
that a variable.

They can be extracted with "tar xzf $file" on newer NetBSD, so many
users will not notice the difference.

>          If installing via USB, you must first uncompress the USB
>          image, which is gzipped.
>                $ gunzip NetBSD-9.1-amd64-install.img.gz
> 
> Where is this to be found?  As an install image, I would expect it to
> be in amd64/installation/, but I see it nowhere, in neither amd64/ nor
> source/.  What did I miss?

The top level "images" directory.

> The others are issues I had when running sysinst.  If anyone wants more
> details on any of these, I can redo the install easily enough.
> 
> - I was operating on serial, and it didn't recognize mterm as a
>    terminal type.  8.0 recognized mterm; was it unreasonable of me to
>    expect 9.1 to?

Which medium did you boot? Some of the ramdisk images have only a small
subset of common terminal types (mostly xterm, vt100, wsvt25 and similar).
The ISO install should know about mterm.

> - I was trying to use MBR partitioning, because the goal was to add 9.1
>    to an already-MBR disk, as another option in mbr_bootsel, but I was
>    installing on a scratch drive because I didn't trust sysinst to do
>    what I wanted it to.  Turned out I was right: I tried to specify
>    start=8, but sysinst wouldn't let me; it overrode that to 2048(!)
>    silently(!!).

Please file a PR for this with MBR / disklabel / disk size information
and a short description of the path you used through sysinst.

> - I couldn't even _try_ to get the sets from the install CD, because it
>    refused to mount the silly thing.

Can you describe this more detailed? Standard case is you boot from the CD
and it already is mounted as / - so no further mounting needed.

> - When asking for a DNS server while configuring the network, it seemed
>    to think I was part of Google; all the offered hosts were Google
>    hosts.  (It also suggested them by name, which leads directly to a
>    chicken-and-egg issue.)

You certainly can enter local IPs there (and normally wouldn't even specify
that if you did DHCP). Not sure what the problem is here.

> - When transferring the sets from my house NFS server, it appears to
>    have drunk the *iB koolaid.

It invokes the standard base system ftp client (combined with progress).

> - The timezone selection menus appear to be completely unusable without
>    arrow keys.  This really should be fixed, especially for serial-line
>    use.

To quote the sysinst welcome page:

 In the following menus type the reference letter (a, b, c, ...) to select an
 item, or type CTRL+N/CTRL+P to select the next/previous item.
 The arrow keys and Page-up/Page-down may also work.
 Activate the current selection from the menu by typing the enter key.

But you are right, that menu is easier with arrow-left / arrow-right.
You can use < and > instead, but that is (AFIK) not documented.

Why did arrow keys not work for you?
I often install via serial, use "rxvt" as TERM and my arrow keys just work.

Martin