Following the source and binary release of NetBSD 1.6.1, now the ISOs are up and ready for your downloading pleasure. Choose among almost 40 architectures.
NetBSD 1.6.1 ISOs are Online
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I hope some of the SPARC SMP bugs from 1.6.0 have been fixed. Apart from that, this is one __VERY__ nice OS.
I recently tried to install NetBSD 1.6 on my SparcStation which only has a floppy drive for removable media. Apparently, however, they forgot to put a Sun disk label on the 1.6 installation floppies, so they were not bootable:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6/LAST_MINUTE
So I patched the floppies (as instructed by the above document). Unfortunately, however, NetBSD’s floppy driver for the sparcstation was broken in 1.6:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=netbsd+sparc+floppy+boot&hl=en&lr…
Apparently they didn’t do much testing on sparc before the release of 1.6… here’s hoping they tested it this time.
If a floppy-install doesn’t work for you, why don’t you netboot your sparcstation? That works like a charm.
Gotta love these real computers that aren’t braindead without an OS on them
Sparcstation floppy drives have known problems, both in NetBSD and OpenBSD. Though you can normally boot from them fine, provided the disk images are allright of course
I’ve never had a problem with the floppy under OpenBSD.
You’re right about netboot, though. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. There’s even explicit instructions on how to do it:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.sun.html
Oh well, I guess that’ll be a fun project for another day.
Installed 1.6.1 on the Old p120 laptop. (worked) Tried to install a second time after dedicating the whole 1 gig drive. Kept getting segfaults while it was installing the various sets.
Gave up and installed Debian via FTP. Debian is getting to be a good friend.
Lucky you
Then there’s a chance you may get it to work under NetBSD too, because NetBSD and OpenBSD have the same roots. Maybe inform the NetBSD devel team of the issues you’re having, and if the problem has been fixed in OpenBSD, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to backport the fix.
I know there are floppy issues with sparcstations, but not with all models. My SS10 makes Open/NetBSD crash when trying to access the floppy, but boots allright from them, which is a known problem, I was told. And my other sparcs don’t have a floppy drive. That’s why I always netboot them