THESE DISKS ARE LIKELY TO EAT YOUR SYSTEM. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT USING THEM WITHOUT MAKING A BACKUP FIRST OR UNLESS YOU HAVE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE FAITH IN MY ABILITIES THAN I DO. THESE DISKS ARE LARGELY UNTESTED AND MAY DO WEIRD STUFF.
Highly experimental debian GNU/NetBSD install disks are now available at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/debian-netbsd/floppies/ . They're network install only at present. In order to use them, simply write the images to disks, bot off disk 1, swap disks when prompted, follow the installation instructions and when prompted select the "Debian" option rather than the "NetBSD" option. THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE OS. THIS IS, IN FACT, BARELY USABLE. DO NOT BOTHER INSTALLING UNLESS YOU'RE PLANNING ON DEVELOPING THIS SYSTEM. At the moment, this won't give you a system that you can actually use to do anything useful. On the other hand, it will give you a system that can apt-get things, so as new packages become available it'll become one. Please do check it out. Notes: A couple of packages give errors during installation, which results in the installer installing everything 5 times. Once the installer is finished, hit a key to continue. The boot loader doesn't seem happy at the moment. It's possible that it'll overwrite whatever bootloader you currently have installed - make sure you've got a recovery disk to rectify this (I haven't tested it on a machine with an OS already installed). You'll probably then need to use the bootloader on floppy 1 to load the OS anyway - at the prompt, hit any key other than return and then type boot rootpartition:netbsd -a so if your root partition is wd0a, type boot wd0a:netbsd -a and then provide the root partition at the prompt that will appear after the kernel is booted. Debconf doesn't seem entirely happy at the moment The init scripts don't work fully yet. This will be rectified. Large quantities of includes are currently missing, so building anything is likely to be a pain. Should be fixed shortly. ifupdown segfaults. I'll look into this. ifconfig and route are fine. There's no ssh or sshd compiled for the new setup yet. Comments: Various bits of utmp handling are still broken. One possibility is to integrate libutmp into libc (which is what I believe utsl has done with the FreeBSD port), though this means that you won't be able to use a stock BSD libc. I'm not sure whether this is a problem or not - discussion is probably good. The dynamic linker has been moved from /usr/libexec to /lib. Keeping it in /usr was impossible given that we don't provide staticaly linked binaries in /, and it would have been the only file in /libexec so I thought it might as well live in /lib. The gcc specs file has been updated to match. I'm currently having trouble getting the gcc build process to put libgcc_s in /lib rather than /usr/lib, which means that the libgcc package never gets built. This is less than ideal - building everything with gcc 3 has resulted in rather a lot linking against it. I've hand-built a binary package for the moment. apt works - add a line like deb http://www.srcf.ucam.org/debian-netbsd sid-netbsd main to /etc/apt/sources.list Patches are in http://www.srcf.ucam.org/debian-netbsd/patches - I'll tidy these up somewhat this evening or tomorrow. Thanks: Thanks to Martin Keegan for fixing the NetBSD sysinst so it builds with ncurses, Nathan Hawkins for providing lots of FreeBSD patches that I've shamelessly stolen and hacked, Joel Baker for hacking on the NetBSD stuff in all sorts of useful ways and VMWare for providing a wonderfully useful program for testing installation (Plex86 doesn't seem to support swapping floppies yet, sadly). -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
