Amiga and BSD o/s

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Mon Feb 21 16:44:20 2000

It was thus said that the Great Gary Hildebrand once stated:
>
> Hello, all you guys out there
>
> I'm wanting to try out one (or both) of Open BSD and NetBSD on my lil' ol'
> Amiga -- I really need someone who has gone through the teething process of
> formatting drives and instaling necessary files, etc.

  I just recently installed NetBSD on one of the HP/Apollo 400s I have
(actually, both, but the second one might have bad SCSI drives) and it was a
nightmare. From reading the documentation for the HP, Sun (since I have a
3/80) and VAX (since I have three of them) it seems the installation process
is different for each one, depending upon how you want to install it.

  I probably can't help with actual specific details about the Amiga
installation, but I can help with some general info---like the partitions
for NetBSD:

  NetBSD (like most BSD derived systems) use the following convention for
partitions (I don't recall the exact terminology used):

        Partion letter use
                a filesystem
                b swap
                c entire disk

  Partitions `d' and above can be used for whatever you need. I can't say
for the Amiga, but on the HP NetBSD install, ``disklabel'' (their version of
``fdisk'') was abysmal, requiring me to know the exact geometry of the disk
(a SCSI disk no less), and I had to work out by hand the partition table.
So, I had a disk with the following geometry:

        Head: 9
        Tracks: 1540
        Sectors/Track: 60
        Sectors/Cyl: 540
        Total Sectors: 831,060

  ``disklabel'' asked the starting offset (in blocks) and size of each
partition. You have to include space for the bootloader (a cylinder) and I
wanted 32M of swap (usual convention is twice the physical RAM, but I wanted
to split the swap space between the two drives) so breaking out the
calculator and pencil, I worked out the following:

        Partition: Start Size

        a 540 765524
        b 766064 65536
        c 0 831,060

  The rest weren't used.

  I should warn you that if the Amiga install is anything like the HP
install, it'll be incredibly braindead and you have to type EXACTLY what
they are expecting (the install program accepted ``disklabel'' but rejected
``disklabel '' (note extra space)) and you may have to do it twice. And
READ everything TWICE before you start---it's all there but sometimes you
have to read between the lines (I found out after wasting several hours that
the boot process was indeed working, but because the kernel didn't support
the video system in my particular HP the screen would go blank. It wasn't
until I hooked up a terminal did I find it actually working).

> Amiga o/s is neat, but Id like to get into something with a more viable
> future.

  Why? The AmigaOS still works. Why ruin it with Unix?

  -spc (Most fun OS to program under)
Received on Mon Feb 21 2000 - 16:44:20 GMT