NetBSD on NEC MobilePro 790 - Install Issue

Hm, that still doesn't sound right.

Edit: when I installed 7.1.2 it worked normally, I didn't have to specify the root device or anything. Did you make sure to set the "/" mount point for your root partition? (See this image).



I think that's best for trying it out. I'm going to try to see if I can get some stuff compiling on 4.

I spoke to kainxkitsune on discord (author of one of those posts you linked on reddit). He stated that the packages he was using were pulled from the 9.3 build but it sounded like he encountered the same issues as we did on that one. I think I'm going to restart the convo over on the netbsd mailing list. Maybe with so many people trying to get it working there will be more interest from the maintainers...


Here's his response:



Edited by thenzero 2022-12-24 5:59 PM

Chris,

I might be able to.....although my colleague here is the real brain in this....

Thanks for all the input...maybe I missed the mount point....will try install again.

Excellent, that you found kain on discord, I looked for him there, but couldn't find him.....

Hopefully, you guys will get this moving forward!

Individual, collaboration. I'd love to see it

Got it.....

Brain + Donkey......

Monkey with specs, surely?

Monkey???

Guess my cosmetic enhancement procedure didn't go so well.....

Happy Holidays!

Mark-

I've revived the discussion over on the NetBSD mailing list. Hopefully with all the momentum we'll actually get something going this time!


Check here.

Thought I would start install from beginning including re-doing disk partitions/info.

However, now the installer doesn't take me to that step. It skips it and goes to the part about doing full or custom install.....

Weird.....

Any idea how to get to the disk setup part again?

Thanks.

UPDATE

If I select Full Install, then it goes to the disk partitioning setup.

Edited by ArchiMark 2022-12-25 1:01 AM

Glad you got that sorted!

Were you able to make it through the install successfully?

Well, took a while messing with partitions info....but then it went through install OK....

However, when I booted up with the netbsd-GENERIC file, it asked me to identify root device.
Did that and then got login prompt for user name and password.
Did that and Voila! got to command prompt.

At that point I went to sleep....



Today I will try using it to actually do something and see what happens.

Thanks again for your help and the photos, it really helped.

Awesome. In the meantime, things are developing on the NetBSD mailing list. I'm hoping we're really gonna get somewhere!

Thanks....unfortunately, got tied up with other things today....so, didn't get to play with NetBSD. Will try tomorrow....likely will be late afternoon or evening.

Great to hear things are happening on the NetBSD list.

Fingers crossed....

Had a very brief time with 790 yesterday.

Booted up NetBSD and again, get message to enter the root device. So, obviously, something didn't go right with install regarding this. Although I did enter info in the partition setup.

Logged in and then added non-root user account and password. Went OK.

Did startx and got the windows....great!

Tried using my ol' Ambicom CF wifi card in pc card adapter....indicator light blinks, and system recognized the card.
But assume I need to do configuration in NetBSD in order to actually use it.

Any tips on doing this?

Also, if I get it working and connected to net, then I use pkgin to install other apps, correct?

Thanks!

That's great!

What are you putting in for the root device out of curiousity? I guess as long as it's booting anyway, we can consider that a minor annoyance to be fixed later?

A quick note about packages. As I noted earlier, the big problem with 4 (the last version which works more or less flawlessly, out of the box, on NEC MobilePro) is that all packages for it have been removed. There are not even any archives of the packages that I've been able to find. Which means you're stuck with the software that was included with the installer, plus anything you manage to compile yourself (which is ALSO quite tricky since the dependencies will be twenty years out of date, so you're stuck hunting old old old versions of source code to compile...).

Regarding your ambicom- once you stick it in, type "ifconfig -a" into a terminal window and see if it lists any devices (apart from your loopback device, lo0). If so, it has recognized your card and created a device for it. If not, you'll want to type "dmesg | tail -20" and post the results here and we'll go from there.

EDIT: I just re-read your message...I missed your statement that "system recognized the card" the first time through. Sorry about that. So I assume it shows up in ifconfig. Then your next steps are to follow this little guide:

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-net-practice.html#chap-net...



Edited by thenzero 2022-12-27 3:02 PM