Installation is supported from several media types, including: * Tape * NFS * Floppy * FTP Note that installing on a "bare" machine requires some bootable device; either a tape or floppy drive or Sun-compatible NFS server with MOP capabilities. (Yes, NetBSD/vax uses the same netboot principles as Sun's does). The procedure for transferring the distribution sets onto installation media depends on the type of media. The most is up to you, depending what you want to install, but preferred are to do the installation over network as soon as the miniroot is installed. * Creating boot tapes: Fetch the two files from .../NetBSD-1.3/vax/tk50. Write them onto the tape, first file1 and then file2. Under Ultrix this is done just like this: mt -f /dev/rmt0h rewind dd if=tk50-file1-1.3 of=/dev/nrmt0h dd if=tk50-file2-1.3 of=/dev/rmt0h mt -f /dev/rmt0h rewoffl Under NetBSD this is done the same way, except for the tape name: mt -f /dev/rmt8 rewind dd if=tk50-file1-1.3 of=/dev/nrmt8 dd if=tk50-file2-1.3 of=/dev/rmt8 mt -f /dev/rmt8 rewoffl Of course, if you have another tape unit than 0 you have to use the corresponding unit number. If you are using any other OS to create bootable tapes, remember that the blocksize _must_ be 512 for the file to be bootable! Otherwise it just won't work. * Creating boot floppies: Fetch the files from .../NetBSD-1.3/vax/rx{50,33} depending of which floppy you have. There are three or seven files depending of the density of your floppies. Then just write the floppies using dd (under Unix, if you are creating floppies from DOS use some nice utility for that). There are one bootable floppy and a splitted miniroot image. * Booting from NFS server: All VAXen that can boot over network uses MOP, a DEC protocol. To be able to use MOP, a MOP daemon must be present on one of the machines on the local network. The boot principle is: * The VS2000 broadcast a wish to load an image. * A mopd answers and send the boot program to the VAX. * The boot program does rarp requests, mounts the root filesystem and loads the kernel. * The kernel is loaded and starts executing. If your machine has a disk and network connection, it may be convenient for you to install NetBSD over the network. This involves temporarily booting your machine over NFS, just long enough so you can initialize its disk. This method requires that you have access to an NFS server on your network so you can configure it to support diskless boot for your machine. Configuring the NFS server is normally a task for a system administrator, and is not trivial. If you are using a NetBSD system as the boot-server, have a look at the diskless(8) manual page for guidelines on how to proceed with this. If the server runs another operating system, consult the documentation that came with it (i.e. add_client(8) on SunOS). You also must install a MOP loader. If you are booting from another NetBSD machine, MOP are included in the distribution, otherwise you may have to install a MOP loader. A loader can be found at ftp.stacken.kth.se:/pub/OS/NetBSD/mopd. Fetch the latest and read the installation instructions. The file that should be loaded are called boot and are located in .../NetBSD-1.3/vax/install. If you are not using the mopd written by Mats O Jansson (as the NetBSD are) then you should get the file boot.mopformat instead. The miniroot to start from is the one called miniroot.tar.gz located also in the install directory. Fetch it, unzip and untar it wherever you have your root filesystem.