NetBSD/amiga System Requirements and Supported Devices

NetBSD1.4.2 runs on any Amiga that has a 68020 or better CPU with some form of MMU, and on 68060 DraCos.

For 68020 and 68030 systems, a FPU is recommended but not required for the system utilities. 68LC040, 68040V and 68LC060 systems don't work correctly at the moment.

The minimal configuration requires 6M of RAM (not including CHIPMEM!) and about 75M of disk space. To install the entire system requires much more disk space, and to run X or compile the system, more RAM is recommended. (6M of RAM will actually allow you to compile, however it won't be speedy. X really isn't usable on a 6M system.)

Here is a table of recommended HD partition sizes for a full install:

partition:     advise,   with X,   needed,   with X
root (/)  20M  20M  15M  15M
user (/usr)    110M 135M 90M  115M
swap      ----- 2M for every M ram -----
local (/usr/local)  up to you

As you may note the recommended size of /usr is 20M greater than needed. This is to leave room for a kernel source and compile tree as you will probably want to compile your own kernel. GENERIC is large and bulky to accommodate all people. For example, most peoples machines have an FPU, so you do not need the bulky FPU_EMULATE option.

Preconfigured or precompiled packages are installed below /usr/pkg per default. You should either make /usr larger (if you intend to install a lot of them), make /usr/pkg an additional partiton, use the -p option to pkg_add to install them in a different place or link /usr/pkg to some different place.

If you only have less than 8M of fast memory, you should make your swap partition larger, as your system will be doing much more swapping. Especially: do NOT place it onto a old small (and normally slow) disk!

Supported devices include:

A4000/A1200 IDE controller, including ATAPI devices.
SCSI host adapters:
     33c93 based boards: A2091, A3000 builtin, A3000 builtin
         modified for Apollo accellerator board, and GVP series II.
     53c80 based boards: 12 Gauge, IVS, Wordsync/Bytesync and
         Emplant.*)
     53c710 based boards: A4091, Magnum, Warp Engine, Zeus
         and DraCo builtin.
     FAS216 based SCSI boards: FastLane Z3, Blizzard I and II,
         Blizzard IV, Blizzard 2060, CyberSCSI Mk I and II.
     53c770 based SCSI baords: Cyberstorm Mk III SCSI, Cyberstorm
         PPC SCSI.
Video controllers:
     ECS, AGA and A2024 built in on various Amigas.
     Retina Z2*****, Retina Z3 and Altais.
     Cirrus CL GD 54xx based boards:
         GVP Spectrum,
         Picasso II, II+ and IV,
         Piccolo and Piccolo SD64.
     Tseng ET4000 based boards:
         Domino and Domino16M proto,
         oMniBus,
         Merlin.
     A2410*****.
     Cybervision 64.
     Cybervision 64/3D.
     

Audio I/O:
     Amiga builtin
     Melody Mpeg-audio layer 2 board

Ethernet controllers:
     A2065 Ethernet
     Hydra Ethernet
     ASDG Ethernet
     A4066 Ethernet
     Ariadne Ethernet
     Ariadne II Ethernet
     Quicknet Ethernet
ARCnet controllers:
     A2060 ARCnet
Tape drives:
     Most SCSI tape drives, including
          Archive Viper, Cipher SCSI-2 ST150.
Scanners:
     SCSI-2 scanners behaving as SCSI-2 scanner devices,
     HP Scanjet II, Mustek SCSI scanner.***)
CD-ROM drives:
     Most SCSI CD-ROM drives
Serial cards:
     HyperCom 3Z, HyperCom 4, HyperCom 3+ and 4+
     MultiFaceCard II and III
     A2232 (normal and clockdoubled)
Amiga floppy drives with Amiga (880/1760kB) and
     IBM (720/1440kB) encoding. ****)
Amiga parallel port.
Amiga serial port.
Amiga mouse.
DraCo serial port, including serial mouse.
DraCo parallel printer port.
Real-time clocks:
     A2000, A3000, A4000 builtin (r/w),
     DraCo builtin (r/o).

If its not on the above lists, there is no support for it in this release. Especially (but this is an incomplete list), there are no drivers for: Blizzard III SCSI option, Ferret SCSI, Oktagon SCSI.

Footnotes: Known problems with some hardware:

*

the Emplant SCSI adapter has been reported by a party to hang after doing part of the installation without problems.

**

SCSI scanner support is machine independent, so it should work, but hasn't been tested yet on most Amiga configurations. There are reports that the Mustek and HP Scanjet hang if accessed from the A3000. This might apply to other 33C93-Adapters, too.

****

Our floppy driver doesn't notice when mounted floppies are write-protected at the moment. Your floppy will stay unchanged, but you might not notice that you didn't write anything due to the buffer cache. Also note that HD floppy drives only get detected as such if a HD floppy is inserted at boot time.

*****

No X11 server available.

Getting the NetBSD System on to Useful Media

Installation is supported from several media types, including:

• AmigaDOS HD partitions

• Tape

• NFS partitions

• FTP

• NetBSD partitions, if doing an upgrade.

• CD-ROM (SCSI or ATAPI)

The miniroot file system needs to be transferred to the NetBSD swap partition. This can be done from AmigaDOS in the case of a new install or upgrade, or from NetBSD when doing an upgrade. See the "Preparing your System for NetBSD Installation" section for details.

The steps necessary to prepare the distribution sets for installation depend on which method of installation you choose. The various methods are explained below.

• To prepare for installing via an AmigaDOS partition:

  To install NetBSD from an AmigaDOS partition, you need to get the NetBSD distribution sets you wish to install on your system on to an AmigaDOS partition. All of the set_name.xx pieces can be placed in a single directory instead of separate ones for each distribution set. This will also simplify the installation work later on.

  Note where you place the files you will need this later.

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the installation process, preparing your hard disk.

• To prepare for installing from CD-ROM:

  To install NetBSD from a CD-ROM drive, make sure it is a SCSI CD-ROM on a SCSI bus currently supported by NetBSD (refer to the supported hardware list) or an ATAPI cd-rom connected to the A1200 or A4000 internal IDE connector. If it is a SCSI CD-ROM on a non-supported SCSI bus like Blizzard-3 SCSI, Apollo SCSI) you must first copy the distribution sets to an AmigaDOS partition like described above.

  If your SCSI CD-ROM is connected to a supported SCSI host adapter, or it is an ATAPI cd-rom connected to the A1200/A4000 internal IDE connector, simply put the CD into the drive before installation.

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the installation process, preparing your hard disk.

• To prepare for installing via a tape:

  To install NetBSD from a tape, you need to somehow get the NetBSD file sets you wish to install on your system on to the appropriate kind of tape.

  If you're making the tape on a UN*X system, the easiest way to do so is:

  dd if=<first file> of=<tape device>
  dd if=<2nd file> of=<tape device>
  ...
  

  where "<tape_device>" is the name of the non-rewinding tape device that describes the tape drive you're using (possibly something like /dev/nrst0, but we make no guarantees 8-). If you can't figure it out, ask your system administrator. "<files>" are the names of the "set_name.tgz" files which you want to be placed on the tape.

  If you have a slow cpu (e.g. 68030 @ 25 MHz) on the target machine, but big tapes, you might want to store the uncompressed installation sets instead. This will help tape streaming when doing the actual installation. E.g, do:

  gzip -d -c <first file> | dd of=<tape device>
  gzip -d -c <2nd file> | dd of=<tape device>
  ...
  

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the installation process, preparing your hard disk.

• To prepare for installing via an NFS partition:

  Note:

  this method of installation is recommended only for those already familiar with using the BSD network-manipulation commands and interfaces. If you aren't, this documentation should help, but is not intended to be all-encompassing.

  Place the NetBSD software you wish to install into a directory on an NFS server, and make that directory mountable by the machine which you will be installing NetBSD on. This will probably require modifying the /etc/exports file of the NFS server and resetting mountd, acts which will require superuser privileges. Note the numeric IP address of the NFS server and of the router closest to the the new NetBSD machine, if the NFS server is not on a network which is directly attached to the NetBSD machine.

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the installation process, preparing your hard disk.

• To prepare for installing via FTP:

  Note:

  this method of installation is recommended only for those already familiar with using the BSD network-manipulation commands and interfaces. If you aren't, this documentation should help, but is not intended to be all-encompassing.

  The preparations for this method of installation are easy: all you have to do is make sure that there's some FTP site from which you can retrieve the NetBSD installation when it's time to do the install. You should know the numeric IP address of that site, the numeric IP address of your nearest router if one is necessary

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the installation process, preparing your hard disk.

• If you are upgrading NetBSD, you also have the option of installing NetBSD by putting the new distribution sets somewhere in your existing file system, and using them from there. To do that, you must do the following:

  Place the distribution sets you wish to upgrade somewhere in your current file system tree. At a bare minimum, you must upgrade the "base" binary distribution, and so must put the "base" set somewhere in your file system. If you wish, you can do the other sets, as well, but you should NOT upgrade the "etc" distribution; the "etc" distribution contains system configuration files that you should review and update by hand.

  Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the upgrade process, actually upgrading your system.

Preparing your System for NetBSD Installation

You will need an AmigaDOS hard drive prep tool to prepare your hard drives for use with NetBSD/Amiga. HDToolBox is provided with the system software and on floppy installation disks since Release 2.0 of AmigaDOS, so we will provide instructions for its use.

Note that NetBSD can't currently be installed on disks with a sector size other than 512 bytes (e.g., "640 MB" 90mm MO media). You can, however, mount ADOSFS partitions on such MOs.

Preparing your hard disk with HDToolBox

A full explanation of HDToolBox can be found with your AmigaDOS manuals and is beyond the scope of this document.

The first time you partition a drive, you need to set its drive type so that you have working geometry parameters. To do this you enter the "Change drive type" menu, and either use "read parameters from drive" or set them manually.

Note you will be modifying your HD's. If you mess something up here you could lose everything on all the drives that you configure. It is therefore advised that you:

1. Write down your current configurations. Do this by examining each partition on the drive and the drives parameters (from Change drive type.)

2. Back up the partitions you are keeping.

This should be done as the HDToolBox manual describes. One thing to note is that if you are not using a Commodore controller you will need to specify the device your SCSI controller uses, e.g. if you have a Warp Engine you would:

from cli,        hdtoolbox warpdrive.device

from wb set the tooltype,
       SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=warpdrive.device

The important things you need to do above and beyond normal partitioning includes (from Partition Drive section):

1. Marking all NetBSD partitions as non-bootable, with two exceptions: the root partition, if you want to boot NetBSD directly, or the swap partition, if you want to boot the installation miniroot directly.

2. Changing the file system parameters of the partitions to NetBSD ones. This must be done from the partitioning section and `Advanced options' must be enabled.

To Make the needed changes:

• Click the `Adv. Options' button
• Click the `Change file system' button
• Choose `Custom File System'
• Turn off `Automount' if on.
• Set the dostype to one of these three choices:

  root partition  : 0x4e425207
  swap partition  : 0x4e425301
  other partitions: 0x4e425507
  

  Here `other' refers to other partitions you will format for reading and writing under NetBSD (e.g. /usr)

  Make sure you hit the return key to enter this value as some versions of HDToolBox will forget your entry if you don't.

• Turn custom boot code off
• Set Reserved Blocks start and end to 0.
• Click Ok.

On the root (and, for installation, swap) partition, set instead this:

• Turn custom boot code on
• Set Reserved Blocks start and end to 0.
• Set Number of Custom Boot Blocks to 16.
• Set Automount This Partition on
• Click Ok.

  Mask and maxtransfer are not used with NetBSD.

Caveat:

The swap (for installation) and the root partition (if you plan to use the bootblocks) MUST BE WITHIN THE FIRST 4 gigabytes of the disk! The reason for the former is that xstreamtodev uses trackdisk.device compatible I/O-calls, the reason for the latter is that the bootblock gets a 32bit partition offset from the operating system.

Once this is done NetBSD/Amiga will be able to recognize your disks and which partitions it should use.

Transferring the miniroot file system

Once the hard disk has been prepared for NetBSD, the miniroot file system (miniroot.fs) is transferred to the swap partition configured during the hard disk prep (or the existing swap partition in the case of an upgrade). The xstreamtodev utility provided in the "amiga/installation/misc" directory can be used on AmigaDOS to transfer the file system for either a new installation or an upgrade. The file system can also be transferred on an existing NetBSD system for an update by using dd. This should only be done after booting NetBSD into single-user state. It may also be possible to shutdown to single-user, providing that the single-user state processes are not using the swap partition.

On AmigaDOS, the command:
       xstreamtodev --input=miniroot.fs --rdb-name=<swap partition>
where <swap partition> is the name you gave to the NetBSD partition to be used for swapping. If xstreamtodev is unable to determine the SCSI driver device name or the unit number of the specified partition, you may also need to include the option
       --device=<driver.name>
and/or
       --unit=<SCSI unit number>

To transfer the miniroot using NetBSD, you should be booted up in single user state on the current NetBSD system, or use the "shutdown now" command to shutdown to single-user state. Then copy the miniroot using dd:
       dd if=miniroot.fs of=/dev/rsd0b
where /dev/rsd0b should be the device path of the swap partition your system is configured to use. Once the file is copied, reboot back to AmigaDOS to boot the upgrade kernel.

Caveat:

Once you have started installation, if you abort it and want to retry you must reinstall the miniroot.fs on the swap partition.

Installing the NetBSD System

Installing NetBSD is a relatively complex process, but, if you have this document in hand and are careful to read and remember the information which is presented to you by the install program, it shouldn't be too much trouble.

Before you begin, you must have already prepared your hard disk as detailed in the section on preparing your system for install.

The following is a walk-through of the steps necessary to get NetBSD installed on your hard disk. If you wish to stop the installation, you may hit Control-C at any prompt, but if you do, you'll have to begin again from scratch.

Transfer the miniroot file system onto the hard disk partition used by NetBSD for swapping, as described in the "Preparing your System for NetBSD Installation" section above.

Booting from AmigaOS, using loadbsd:

Next you need to get yourself into NetBSD by loading the kernel from AmigaDOS with loadbsd like so:
       loadbsd -b netbsd

If you have an AGA machine, and your monitor will handle the dblNTSC mode, you may also include the -A option to enable the dblNTSC display mode.

If your machine has a fragmented physical memory space, as, e.g., DraCo machines, you should add the -n2 option to enable the use of all memory segments.

If you have a M680x0 + PPC board, make sure the PPC cpu is inactive before using loadbsd, else the kernel will hang!

Directly booting NetBSD, with boot blocks installed:

[This description is for V40 (OS 3.1) ROMs. For older ROMs, there might be small differences. Check your AmigaOS documentation to learn about the exact procedure.] Using bootblocks may not work on some systems, and may require a mountable filesystem on others.

Reboot your machine, holding down both mouse buttons if you have a 2-button mouse, the outer mouse buttons if you have a 3-button mouse. On the DraCo, press the left mouse button instead, when the boot screen prompts you for it.

From the boot menu, select Boot Options. Select the swap partition with the miniroot, and then ok. Select Boot now. The machine will boot the bootblock, which will prompt your for a command line. You have a few seconds time to change the default. Entering an empty line will accept the default.

The bootblock uses command lines of the form:
file[ options]
where file is the kernel file name on the partition where the boot block is on, and [options] are the same as with loadbsd. E.g., instead of
       loadbsd -bsSn2 netbsd
use
       netbsd -bsSn2

Once your kernel boots:

If the system should hang after entering the root device, try again with
       loadbsd -I ff -b netbsd
This disables synchronous transfer on all SCSI devices.

The system should continue to boot. For now ignore WARNING: messages about bad dates in clocks, and a warning about /etc/rc not existing. Eventually you will be be asked to enter the pathname of the shell, just hit return. After a short while, you will be asked to select the type of your keyboard. After you have entered a valid response here, the system asks you if you want to install or upgrade your system. Since you are reading the 'install' section, 'i' would be the proper response here...

The installer starts with a nice welcome messages. Read this message carefully, it also informs you of the risks involved in continuing! If you still want to go on, type 'y'. The installer now continues by trying to figure out your disk configuration. When it is done, you will be prompted to select a root device from the list of disks it has found.

You should know at this point that the disks are NOT numbered according to their scsi-id! The NetBSD kernel numbers the scsi drives (and other devices on the scsi bus) sequentially as it finds them. The drive with the lowest scsi id will be called sd0, the next one sd1, etc. Also, any Amiga internal IDE disk drives will be configured as "SCSI" drives, and will be configured before any 'real' SCSI drives (if any are present).

The installer will offer you to look at the NetBSD disk label of the disks at this point. You should do this, to find out what partition letters the NetBSD kernel assigned to the partitions you created, and as a check whether the disk number you are going to use is right.

you are now at the point of no return. If you confirm that you want to install NetBSD, your hard drive will be modified, and perhaps its contents scrambled at the whim of the install program. Type Control-C NOW if you don't want this.

At this time, you will need to tell the installer which partition will be associated with the different filesystems. Normally, you'll want to add a partition for /usr, at least.

Caveat:

Do not use the (r)sdNc partitions for anything! They are for access to the whole disk only and do not correspond to any Amiga partition!

The install program will now make the the file systems you specified. There should be only one error per file system in this section of the installation. It will look like this:

newfs: ioctl (WDINFO): Invalid argument
newfs: /dev/rsd0a: can't rewrite disk label

If there are any others, restart from the the beginning of the installation process. This error is ok as the Amiga does not write disklabels currently. You should expect this error whenever using newfs.

The install will now ask you want to configure any network information. It ill ask for the machine's host name, domain name, and other network configuration information.

Since the network configuration might have lead to additional (nfs) filesystem entries, you get another chance to modify your fstab.

You are finally at the point where some real data will be put on your freshly made filesystems. Select the device type you wish to install from and off you go....

Some notes:

- If you want to install from tape, please read the section about how to create such a tape.

- Some tapes (e.g. Archive Viper 150) refuse to operate with the default tape density ("nrst0"). Try "nrst0h", "nrst0m", or "nrst0l" instead.

- Install at least the base and etc sets.

- If you have to specify a path relative to the mount-point and you need the mount-point itself, enter '.'.

Next you will be asked to specify the timezone. Just select the timezone you are in. The installer will make the correct setup on your root filesystem. After the timezone-link is installed, the installer will proceed by creating the device nodes on your root filesystem.

Be patient, this will take a while...

Finally, the installer ask you if you want to install the bootblock code on your root disk. This is a matter of personal choice and can also be done from a running NetBSD system. See the 'installboot(8)' manual page about how to do this.

Once the installer is done, halt the system with the halt command (wait for halted to be displayed) and reboot. Then again boot NetBSD this time with the command:
       loadbsd netbsd
or select the root partition from the boot menu, and tell it to boot
       netbsd -s

You need to do your final tweaks now. First mount your file systems like so:
       mount -av

Your system is now complete but not completely configured; you should adjust the /etc/sendmail.cf file as necessary to suit your site. You should also examine and adjust the settings in /etc/rc.conf. You can use vi(1) or ed(1) to edit the files. If you installed the man pages you can type man vi or man ed for instructions on how to use these somewhat non-intuitive editors.

Once you are done with the rest of configuration unmount your file systems and halt your system, then reboot:

cd /
umount -av
halt

Finally you can now boot your system and it will be completely functional:
       loadbsd -a netbsd

When it boots off of the hard drive, you will have a complete NetBSD system! Congratulations! (You really deserve them!!!)

Post installation steps

Once you've got the operating system running, there are a few things you need to do in order to bring the system into a propperly configured state, with the most important ones described below.

1. Configuring /etc/rc.conf

   If you haven't done any configuration of /etc/rc.conf, the system will drop you into single user mode on first reboot with the message        /etc/rc.conf is not configured. Multiuser boot aborted.
   and with the root filesystem mounted read-write. When the system asks you to choose a shell, simply hit return to get to a prompt. If you are asked for a terminal type, respond with vt220 (or whatever is appropriate for your terminal type) 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
   If you have /var on a seperate partition, you need to repeat that step for it. After that, you can edit /etc/rc.conf with vi(1). When you have finished, type exit at the prompt to leave the single-user shell and continue with the multi-user boot.

   Other values that need to be set in /etc/rc.conf for a networked environment are hostname and possibly defaultroute, furthermore add an ifconfig_int for your interface <int>, along the lines of
          ifconfig_de0="inet 123.45.67.89 netmask 255.255.255.0"
   or, if you have myname.my.dom in /etc/hosts:
          ifconfig_de0="inet myname.my.dom netmask 255.255.255.0"
   To enable proper hostname resolution, you will also want to add an /etc/resolv.conf file or (if you are feeling a little more adventurous) run named(8). See resolv.conf(5) or named(8) for more information.

   Other files in /etc that are new to NetBSD 1.4 and may require modification or setting up include /etc/mailer.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/wscons.conf.

2. Logging in

   After reboot, you can 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 an account for yourself (see below) and protect it and the "root" account with good passwords.

3. Adding accounts

   Use the vipw(8) command to add accounts to your system, do not edit /etc/passwd directly. See adduser(8) for more information on the process of how to add a new user to the system.

4. The X Window System

   If you have installed the X window system, look at the files in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc for information.

   Don't forget to add /usr/X11R6/bin to your path in your shell's dot file so that you have access to the X binaries.

5. Installing 3rd party packages

   There is a lot of software freely available for Unix-based systems, almost all of which can run on NetBSD. Modifications are usually needed to when transferring programs between different Unix-like systems, so the NetBSD packages collection incorporates any such changes necessary to make that software run on NetBSD, and makes the installation (and deinstallation) of the software packages easy. There's also the option of building a package from source, in case there's no precompiled binary available.

   Precompiled binaries can be found at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/ Package sources for compiling packages can be obtained by retrieving the file ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/tar_files/pkgsrc.tar.gz and extracting it into /usr/pkgsrc. See /usr/pkgsrc/README then for more information.

6. Misc

   • To adjust the system to your local timezone, point the /etc/localtime symlink to the appropriate file under /usr/share/zoneinfo.

   • Edit /etc/aliases to forward root mail to the right place (run newaliases(1) afterwards.)

   • The /etc/sendmail.cf file will almost definitely need to be adjusted; files aiding in this can be found in /usr/share/sendmail. See the README file there for more information.

   • Edit /etc/rc.local to run any local daemons you use.

   • Many of the /etc files are documented in section 5 of the manual; so just invoking
            man filename
     is likely to give you more information on these files.