The installation can be broken down into three basic steps: * Run Mkfs to build a filesystem or filesystems. * Run the Installer to load the files onto your filesystems. * Run the Booter to boot the system. **** Preparing the filesystem(s) Double-click on the Mkfs application icon to start it up. It will ask you for the SCSI ID of the drive that you are installing upon. Once this is selected, it will present a list of the partitions on that disk. You must first convert the partitions to a type which NetBSD can understand. Select each partition on which you wish to build a filesystem and click on the "Change" button. If you are placing the entire installation on a single partition, select the "NetBSD Root&Usr" radio button. If you are using multiple partitions, select "NetBSD Root" for the root partition and "NetBSD Usr" for all the other partitions. You should select "NetBSD Swap" for the swap partition. When you have finished converting each partition, select each partition and click on the "Format" button. You will now be asked for a bunch of parameters for the hard drive and the filesystem. Usually, you can just take the defaults. If you are installing onto removable media (e.g. a Zip, Jaz, or Syquest), please see the FAQ. Note that although this dialog only has the "OK" button, you are not committed, yet. Once you get the values you want, press the "OK" button. A dialog will be presented at this point with two options: "Format" and "Cancel." If you choose "Cancel," nothing will be written to your drive. If you choose "Format," the program will proceed to make a filesystem. Mkfs is not a well-behaved Macintosh application. It will not allow any other tasks to run while it does (cooperative multitasking at its best). When it's finished, the program will put up a dialog to ask if you have scanned the output for any error messages. Usually there won't have been any errors, but do scan the output to make sure. Simply click on the "I Read It" button and the program will quit. Repeat as necessary for any extra partitions that you wish to make filesystems on. Note that you do _not_ need a filesystem on your swap partition. When you are finished, click on the "Done" button and choose "Quit" from the "File" menu to exit Mkfs. **** Installing the files Before using the Installer, it is probably a good idea to increase its memory allocation. Select the Installer icon by clicking on it and choose "Get Info" from the File menu. Increase both the Minimum and Preferred sizes to as much as you can spare. Double-click on the Installer icon to start it up. The Installer will present the same SCSI ID menu that Mkfs did. Select the same SCSI ID that you did for Mkfs--i.e., the one you are installing onto. If you are installing onto a single root partition, proceed to the "Installation of base files" section, below. If you have not created filesystems for the root, usr, and any other filesystems, go back to "Preparing the filesystem(s)," above. When you started the Installer, it mounted your root partition. Just before it printed, "Mounting partition 'A' as /," it printed lines like: sd1 at scsi ID 5. This means that the device for scsi ID 5 is sd1. The partitions are signified by a trailing letter. For instance, sd1a would be the root partition of the second scsi disk in the chain, and sd0g would be the first Usr partition on the first scsi disk. You will need to know the proper device to mount the remaining partition(s) by hand: * Select "Build Devices" from the "File" menu. * Select "Mini Shell" from the "File" menu. * You can use the 'disklabel' command to get a listing of the available partitions and their types and sizes. * Mount the filesystems you wish with the command: mount device path For example, if you wish to mount a usr partition from the first scsi disk, sd0, on /usr, you would type: mount /dev/sd0g /usr * Type "fstab force" to create a proper /etc/fstab file * Type "quit" after you have mounted all the filesystems. Installation of base files: Select the "Install" menu item from the "File" menu and install base.tgz, etc.tgz, netbsd.tgz, and any other sets you wish to install at this time (see the contents section for information about what's in each set). The Installer will print out the filename of each file as it is installed, and will take quite some time to install everything (the base package alone can take over an hour on a slow hard drive). As is the case with Mkfs, this is not a particularly well-behaved Macintosh application and the machine will be completely tied up while the installation takes place. At some point after installing the base set, select the "Build Devices" option from the "File" menu if you have not already done so. This will create a bunch of device nodes for you and will create your initial /etc/fstab. The Installer program also has an option to give you a mini-shell. Do not use this unless you are sure know what you are doing. When you are finished installing all of the sets you wish to install, exit the Installer by choosing "Quit" from the "File" menu. **** Booting the system Prior to attempting to boot NetBSD/mac68k, please verify that all of the following are true: 1) 32-bit addressing is enabled[*] in the Memory control panel; 2) All forms of virtual memory are disabled (the Memory control panel, RAM Doubler, or other software-based memory enhancement products); and 3) Your system is in B&W mode (1-bit color or grayscale) as shown by the Monitors control panel. You may choose to have the Booter do this for you automatically by selecting the appropriate check box and radio button in the "Monitors" dialog on the "Options" menu. It is probably best to boot your machine with all extensions turned off[*]. You can do this by booting into MacOS with the SHIFT key held down. You may have to restart your Macintosh for changes to take effect before proceeding. [* NOTE: If you have an older II-class system (including the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30), it is necessary to install Connectix's MODE32 to work around ROM issues which prevent you from enabling 32-bit addressing. Please see for more information.] Double-click on the NetBSD/mac68k Booter icon to start the application. Select "Booting" from the "Options" menu. Check that all of the items in the resulting dialog look sane--especially the SCSI ID. If not, correct them to your preference (the SCSI ID should be the only thing you need to change). When you are satisfied with your choices, try booting NetBSD by selecting "Boot Now" from the "Options" menu. If you wish to save your preferences, choose "Save Options" from the "File" menu before Booting (your preferences will not be saved if you forget to do this). If the system does not come up, send mail to scottr@netbsd.org describing your software, your hardware, and as complete a description of the problem as you can. If the system does come up, congratulations, you have successfully installed NetBSD _VER. When you first boot into NetBSD, it will automatically drop you into single-user mode with the root filesystem mounted read-write. The system will ask you to choose a shell. Simply hit return to get to a prompt. If you are asked for a terminal type, respond with 'vt220' and hit return. At this point, you need to configure at least one file in the /etc directory. Change to the /etc directory and take a look at the /etc/rc.conf file. Modify it to your tastes, making sure that you set "rc_configured=YES" so that your changes will be enabled and a multi-user boot can proceed. If your /usr directory is on a separate partition and you do not know how to use 'ed' or 'ex', you will have to mount your /usr partition to gain access to 'vi'. Do the following: mount /usr export TERM=vt220 You can then edit /etc/rc.conf with 'vi'. When you have finished, type 'exit' at the prompt to leave the single-user shell and continue with the multi-user boot. You should log in as "root" at the login prompt. There is no initial password, but if you're using the machine in a networked environment, you should create yourself an account and protect it and the "root" account with good passwords. Please see the adduser(8) man page for more information on how to add a new user. Some of the files in the NetBSD _VER distribution might need to be tailored for your site. In particular, the /etc/resolv.conf file will almost definitely need to be adjusted, and other files in /etc will probably need to be modified, as well. Many of these files are described in section 5 of the manual pages. See intro(5) for more information. If you are unfamiliar with UN*X-like system administration, it's recommended that you buy a book that discusses it.