Installation procedure for NetBSD/i386 9.1

NAME

INSTALL - Installation procedure for NetBSD/i386.

CONTENTS


 About this Document
 Quick install notes for the impatient
 What is NetBSD?
 Dedication
 Changes Between The NetBSD 8 and 9 Releases
    Installation and Partitioning Changes
 Features to be removed in a later release
 The NetBSD Foundation
 Sources of NetBSD
 NetBSD 9.1 Release Contents
    NetBSD/i386 subdirectory structure
    Binary distribution sets
 NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices
    Supported devices
       Floppy controllers.
       MFM, ESDI, IDE, and RLL hard disk controllers
       SCSI host adapters
       MDA, CGA, VGA, SVGA, and HGC Display Adapters
       Serial ports
       Parallel ports.
       Ethernet adapters
       FDDI adapters
       Token-Ring adapters
       Wireless network adapters
       High Speed Serial
       Tape drives
       CD-ROM drives
       Mice
       Sound Cards
       Game Ports (Joysticks)
       Miscellaneous
       PCMCIA Controllers.
       RAID Controllers
       Specific driver footnotes:
 Getting the NetBSD System on to Useful Media
 Preparing your System for NetBSD installation
 Installing the NetBSD System
    Running the sysinst installation program
       Introduction
       Possible hardware problems
       General
       Quick install
       Booting NetBSD
       Network configuration
       Installation drive selection and parameters
       Selecting which sets to install
       Partitioning the disk
       Preparing your hard disk
       Getting the distribution sets
       Installation from CD-ROM
       Installation using FTP
       Installation using NFS
       Installation from a floppy set
       Installation from an unmounted file system
       Installation from a local directory
       Extracting the distribution sets
       Configure additional items
       Finalizing your installation
 Post installation steps
 Upgrading a previously-installed NetBSD System
 Compatibility Issues With Previous NetBSD Releases
 Using online NetBSD documentation
 Administrivia
 Thanks go to
 Legal Mumbo-Jumbo
 The End

DESCRIPTION

About this Document

This document describes the installation procedure for NetBSD 9.1 on the i386 platform. It is available in four different formats titled INSTALL.ext, where .ext is one of .ps, .html, .more, or .txt:

.ps
PostScript.

.html
Standard Internet HTML.

.more
The enhanced text format used on UNIX-like systems by the more(1) and less(1) pager utility programs. This is the format in which the on-line man pages are generally presented.

.txt
Plain old ASCII.

You are reading the HTML version.

Quick install notes for the impatient

This section contains some brief notes describing what you need to install NetBSD 9.1 on a machine of the i386 architecture.

What is NetBSD?

The NetBSD Operating System is a fully functional Open Source UNIX-like operating system derived from the University of California, Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2 sources. NetBSD runs on many different different system architectures (ports) across a variety of distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 9.1 release contains complete binary releases for most of these system architectures, with preliminary support for the others included in source form. Please see the NetBSD website for information on them.

NetBSD is a completely integrated system. In addition to its highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools, all accompanied by full source code.

NetBSD is a creation of the members of the Internet community. Without the unique cooperation and coordination the net makes possible, NetBSD would not exist.

Dedication

NetBSD 9.0 is dedicated to the memory of Matthias Drochner, who passed away in August 2018 and Eric Schnoebelen, who passed away in March 2019.

Matthias' technical contributions are too many to list here in full. He was a long term contributor and commited more than 3000 changes all over the NetBSD source tree and lately was especially active in keeping some of our most weired ancient VME architectures in shape.

Eric was a long term pkgsrc developer and well known community member.

Beyond their technical contributions, Eric and Matthias were always helpful and friendly. Their example encouraged users to contribute to the project and share their work with the community.

Changes Between The NetBSD 8 and 9 Releases

The NetBSD 9.1 release provides many significant changes, including support for many new devices, hundreds of bug fixes, new and updated kernel subsystems, and numerous userland enhancements. The result of these improvements is a stable operating system fit for production use that rivals most commercially available systems.

It is impossible to completely summarize the massive development that went into the NetBSD 9.1 release. The complete list of changes can be found in the following files:
CHANGES
CHANGES-9.1
files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 9.1 release tree.

Installation and Partitioning Changes
The sysinst installation program has been reworked for this release.

It now supports arbitrary big disks and offers GPT partitions as alternative to MBR/fdisk partitions on a lot architectures.

Unfortunately it has not been tested on all hardware supported by NetBSD. If you have problems partitioning the target disk or installing the system, please report bugs with as much details as possible. See the Administrivia section below on how to report bugs or contact other users and ask for support.

Features to be removed in a later release

The following features are to be removed from NetBSD in the future:

The NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation is a tax exempt, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation that devotes itself to the traditional goals and Spirit of the NetBSD Project and owns the trademark of the word ``NetBSD''. It supports the design, development, and adoption of NetBSD worldwide. More information on the NetBSD Foundation, its composition, aims, and work can be found at:
       https://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/

Sources of NetBSD

Refer to mirrors

NetBSD 9.1 Release Contents

The root directory of the NetBSD 9.1 release is organized as follows:

.../NetBSD-9.1/

CHANGES
Changes between the 8.0 and 9.0 releases.

CHANGES-9.0
Changes between the initial 9.0 branch and final release of 9.0.

CHANGES-9.1
Changes between the 9.0 and the 9.1 release.

CHANGES.prev
Changes in previous NetBSD releases.

LAST_MINUTE
Last minute changes and notes about the release.

README.files
README describing the distribution's contents.

images/
Images (ISO 9660 or USB) for installing NetBSD. Depending on your system, these may be bootable.

source/
Source distribution sets; see below.

In addition to the files and directories listed above, there is one directory per architecture, for each of the architectures for which NetBSD 9.1 has a binary distribution.

The source distribution sets can be found in subdirectories of the source subdirectory of the distribution tree. They contain the complete sources to the system. The source distribution sets are as follows:

gnusrc
This set contains the ``gnu'' sources, including the source for the compiler, assembler, groff, and the other GNU utilities in the binary distribution sets.

sharesrc
This set contains the ``share'' sources, which include the sources for the man pages not associated with any particular program; the sources for the typesettable document set; the dictionaries; and more.

src
This set contains all of the base NetBSD 9.1 sources which are not in gnusrc, sharesrc, or syssrc.

syssrc
This set contains the sources to the NetBSD 9.1 kernel for all architectures as well as the config(1) utility.

xsrc
This set contains the sources to the X Window System.

All the above source sets are located in the source/sets subdirectory of the distribution tree.

The source sets are distributed as compressed tar files. Except for the pkgsrc set, which is traditionally unpacked into /usr/pkgsrc, all sets may be unpacked into /usr/src with the command:
       # cd / ; tar -zxpf set_name.tgz

In each of the source distribution set directories, there are files which contain the checksums of the files in the directory:

MD5
MD5 digests in the format produced by the command:
cksum -a MD5 file.

SHA512
SHA512 digests in the format produced by the command:
cksum -a SHA512 file.

The SHA512 digest is safer, but MD5 checksums are provided so that a wider range of operating systems can check the integrity of the release files.

NetBSD/i386 subdirectory structure
The i386-specific portion of the NetBSD 9.1 release is found in the i386 subdirectory of the distribution: .../NetBSD-9.1/i386/. It contains the following files and directories:

INSTALL.html
INSTALL.ps
INSTALL.txt
INSTALL.more
Installation notes in various file formats, including this file. The .more file contains underlined text using the more(1) conventions for indicating italic and bold display.
binary/
kernel/
netbsd-GENERIC.gz
A gzipped NetBSD kernel containing code for everything supported in this release.
netbsd-MONOLITHIC.gz
The monolithic kernel which doesn't use kernel modules.
netbsd-INSTALL.gz
The installation kernel.
netbsd-LEGACY.gz
The kernel containing support for ISA (VGA and PC Display) display devices.
netbsd-INSTALL_XEN3PAE_DOMU.gz
netbsd-INSTALL_XEN3_DOMU.gz
netbsd-XEN3PAE_DOMU.gz
netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz
netbsd-XEN3_DOMU.gz
sets/
i386 binary distribution sets; see below.
installation/
cdrom/
i386 bootable cdrom images; see below.
floppy/
i386 boot and installation floppies; see below.
miniroot/
i386 kernel modules providing memory disk root file systems for expert usage.
misc/
Miscellaneous i386 installation utilities; see installation section below.
Binary distribution sets
The NetBSD i386 binary distribution sets contain the binaries which comprise the NetBSD 9.1 release for i386. The binary distribution sets can be found in the i386/binary/sets subdirectory of the NetBSD 9.1 distribution tree, and are as follows:

base
The NetBSD 9.1 i386 base binary distribution. You must install this distribution set. It contains the base NetBSD utilities that are necessary for the system to run and be minimally functional.

comp
Things needed for compiling programs. This set includes the system include files (/usr/include) and the various system libraries (except the shared libraries, which are included as part of the base set). This set also includes the manual pages for all of the utilities it contains, as well as the system call and library manual pages.

debug
This distribution set contains debug information for all base system utilities. It is useful when reporting issues with binaries or during developement. This set is huge, if the target disk is small, do not install it.

etc
This distribution set contains the system configuration files that reside in /etc and in several other places. This set must be installed if you are installing the system from scratch, but should not be used if you are upgrading.

games
This set includes the games and their manual pages.

kern-GENERIC
This set contains a NetBSD/i386 9.1 GENERIC kernel, named /netbsd. You must install this distribution set.

man
This set includes all of the manual pages for the binaries and other software contained in the base set. Note that it does not include any of the manual pages that are included in the other sets.

misc
This set includes the system dictionaries, the typesettable document set, and other files from /usr/share.

modules
This set includes kernel modules to add functionality to a running system.

rescue
This set includes the statically linked emergency recover binaries installed in /rescue.

text
This set includes NetBSD's text processing tools, including groff(1), all related programs, and their manual pages.

NetBSD maintains its own set of sources for the X Window System in order to assure tight integration and compatibility. These sources are based on X.Org. Binary sets for the X Window System are distributed with NetBSD. The sets are:

xbase
The basic files needed for a complete X client environment. This does not include the X servers.

xcomp
The extra libraries and include files needed to compile X source code.

xdebug
This distribution set contains debug information for all X11 binaries. It is useful when reporting issues with these binaries or during developement. This set is huge, if the target disk is small, do not install it.

xfont
Fonts needed by the X server and by X clients.

xetc
Configuration files for X which could be locally modified.

xserver
The X server. This includes the modular Xorg server.

The i386 binary distribution sets are distributed as gzipped tar files named with the extension .tgz, e.g. base.tgz.

The instructions given for extracting the source sets work equally well for the binary sets, but it is worth noting that if you use that method, the filenames stored in the sets are relative and therefore the files are extracted below the current directory. Therefore, if you want to extract the binaries into your system, i.e. replace the system binaries with them, you have to run the tar -xzpf command from the root directory ( / ) of your system.

Note:
Each directory in the i386 binary distribution also has its own checksum files, just as the source distribution does.

NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices

NetBSD 9.1 runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32 processors. The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space.

NetBSD requires a numeric co-processor. The target system must have one of the following processors:

On systems with under 32MB of memory, a custom installation of NetBSD can be performed manually. That procedure is not documented here.
Supported devices
Explanation of bracketed footnote tags [] follows this listing.

Specific driver footnotes:

[*]
Drivers are not present in kernels on the distribution floppies. Except as noted above, all drivers are present on all disks. Also, at the present time, the distributed kernels support only one SCSI host adapter per machine. NetBSD normally allows more, though, so if you have more than one, you can use all of them by compiling a custom kernel once NetBSD is installed.

[+]
Support is included in the GENERIC kernels, although it is not in the kernels which are on the distribution floppies.

[b]
Devices require BIOS support for PCI-PCI bridging on your motherboard. Most reasonably modern Pentium motherboards have this support, or can acquire it via a BIOS upgrade.

[m]
Devices are only supported by MCA-enabled kernels.

Getting the NetBSD System on to Useful Media

If you are not booting off a CD-ROM, you will need to have some floppy disks to boot off; either three 1.44 MB floppies or one 1.2 MB floppy.

Use boot1.fs and boot2.fs for VGA installation. boot-com1.fs and boot-com2.fs are available if you wish to use a serial console.

If you are using a UNIX-like system to write the floppy images to disks, you should use the dd command to copy the file system image(s) (.fs file) directly to the raw floppy disk. It is suggested that you read the dd(1) manual page or ask your system administrator to determine the correct set of arguments to use; it will be slightly different from system to system, and a comprehensive list of the possibilities is beyond the scope of this document.

If you are using Microsoft Windows to write the floppy image(s) to floppy disk, you can use the Rawrite32 Windows program. It can be downloaded from        https://www.NetBSD.org/~martin/rawrite32.
A rawrite utility for the MS-DOS environment is also available in the i386/installation/misc/ directory of the i386 install media.

Installation is supported from several media types, including:

The steps necessary to prepare the distribution sets for installation depend upon which installation medium you choose. The steps for the various media are outlined below.

CD-ROM / DVD / USB-stick
Find out where the distribution set files are on the CD-ROM, DVD or USB stick. Likely locations are binary/sets and i386/binary/sets. (You only need to know this if you are mixing installer and installation media from different versions - the installer will know the proper default location for the sets it comes with).

Proceed to the instructions on installation.

FTP
The preparations for this installation/upgrade method are easy; all you need to do is make sure that there's an FTP site from which you can retrieve the NetBSD distribution when you're about to install or upgrade. If you don't have DHCP available on your network, you will need to know the numeric IP address of that site, and, if it's not on a network directly connected to the machine on which you're installing or upgrading NetBSD, you need to know the numeric IP address of the router closest to the NetBSD machine. Finally, you need to know the numeric IP address of the NetBSD machine itself.

Once you have this information, you can proceed to the next step in the installation or upgrade process. If you're installing NetBSD from scratch, go to the section on preparing your hard disk, below. If you're upgrading an existing installation, go directly to the section on upgrading.

NFS
Place the NetBSD distribution sets you wish to install into a directory on an NFS server, and make that directory mountable by the machine on which you are installing or upgrading NetBSD. This will probably require modifying the /etc/exports file on the NFS server and resetting its mount daemon (mountd). (Both of these actions will probably require superuser privileges on the server.)

You need to know the numeric IP address of the NFS server, and, if you don't have DHCP available on your network and the server is not on a network directly connected to the machine on which you're installing or upgrading NetBSD, you need to know the numeric IP address of the router closest to the NetBSD machine. Finally, you need to know the numeric IP address of the NetBSD machine itself.

Once the NFS server is set up properly and you have the information mentioned above, you can proceed to the next step in the installation or upgrade process. If you're installing NetBSD from scratch, go to the section on preparing your hard disk, below. If you're upgrading an existing installation, go directly to the section on upgrading.

Tape
To install NetBSD from a tape, you need to make a tape that contains the distribution set files, in `tar' format.

If you're making the tape on a UNIX-like system, the easiest way to do so is probably something like:


       # tar -cf tape_device dist_sets

where tape_device is the name of the tape device that represents the tape drive you're using. This might be /dev/rst0, or something similar, but it will vary from system to system. In the above example, dist_sets is a list of filenames corresponding to the distribution sets that you wish to place on the tape. For instance, to put the kern-GENERIC, base, and etc distributions on tape (the absolute minimum required for installation), you would do the following:


       # cd .../NetBSD-9.1
       # cd i386/binary
       # tar -cf tape_device kern-GENERIC.tgz base.tgz etc.tgz

Note:
You still need to fill in tape_device in the example.

Once you have the files on the tape, you can proceed to the next step in the installation or upgrade process. If you're installing NetBSD from scratch, go to the section on preparing your hard disk, below. If you're upgrading an existing installation, go directly to the section on upgrading.


Preparing your System for NetBSD installation

First and foremost, before beginning the installation process, make sure you have a reliable backup of any data on your hard disk that you wish to keep. Mistakes in partitioning your hard disk may lead to data loss.

It is strongly recommended that as part of the installation procedure, you upgrade your system's BIOS to the latest version available from your system vendor. Later BIOSes often contain workarounds for CPU and chipset bugs, workarounds that cannot be provided by the operating system.

In the past, bugs fixed this way have been known to cause unpredictable behaviour and frequent system crashes with NetBSD and other UNIX-like operating systems on x86 hardware.

Before you begin, you should be aware of the geometry issues that may arise in relation to your hard disk. First of all, you should know about sector size. You can count on this to be 512 bytes; other sizes are rare (and currently not supported). Of particular interest are the number of sectors per track, the number of tracks per cylinder (also known as the number of heads), and the number of cylinders. Together they describe the disk geometry.

The BIOS has a limit of 1024 cylinders and 63 sectors per track for doing BIOS I/O. This is because of the old programming interface to the BIOS that restricts these values. Most of the big disks currently being used have more than 1024 real cylinders. Some have more than 63 sectors per track. Therefore, the BIOS can be instructed to use a fake geometry that accesses most of the disk and the fake geometry has less than or equal to 1024 cylinders and less than or equal to 63 sectors. This is possible because the disks can be addressed in a way that is not restricted to these values, and the BIOS can internally perform a translation. This can be activated in most modern BIOSes by using Large or LBA mode for the disk.

NetBSD does not have the mentioned limitations with regard to the geometry. However, since the BIOS has to be used during startup, it is important to know about the geometry the BIOS uses. The NetBSD kernel should be on a part of the disk where it can be loaded using the BIOS, within the limitations of the BIOS geometry. The install program will check this for you, and will give you a chance to correct this if this is not the case.

If you have not yet installed any other systems on the hard disk that you plan to install NetBSD on, or if you plan to use the disk entirely for NetBSD, you may wish to check your BIOS settings for the `Large' or `LBA' modes, and activate them for the hard disk in question. While they are not needed by NetBSD as such, doing so will remove the limitations mentioned above, and will avoid hassle should you wish to share the disk with other systems. Do not change these settings if you already have data on the disk that you want to preserve!

In any case, it is wise to check your the BIOS settings for the hard disk geometry before beginning the installation, and write them down. While this should usually not be needed, it enables you to verify that the install program determines these values correctly.

The geometry that the BIOS uses will be referred to as the BIOS geometry, the geometry that NetBSD uses is the real geometry.

sysinst, the NetBSD installation program, will try to discover both the real geometry and BIOS geometry.

It is important that sysinst know the proper BIOS geometry to be able to get NetBSD to boot, regardless of where on your disk you put it. It is less of a concern if the disk is going to be used entirely for NetBSD. If you intend to have several OSes on your disk, this becomes a much larger issue.

Installing the NetBSD System

Running the sysinst installation program

  1. Introduction

    Using sysinst, installing NetBSD is a relatively easy process. Still, you should read this document and have it available during the installation process. This document tries to be a good guide to the installation, and as such, covers many details for the sake of completeness. Do not let this discourage you; the install program is not hard to use.

  2. Possible hardware problems

    Should you encounter hardware problems during installation, try rebooting after unplugging removable devices you don't need for installation. Non-removable devices can be disabled with userconf (use boot -c to enter it).

  3. General

    The following is a walk-through of the steps you will take while installing NetBSD on your hard disk. sysinst is a menu driven program that guides you through the installation process. Sometimes questions will be asked, and in many cases the default answer will be displayed in brackets (``[ ]'') after the question. If you wish to stop the installation, you may press CONTROL-C at any time, but if you do, you'll have to begin the installation process again from scratch by running the /sysinst program from the command prompt. It is not necessary to reboot.

  4. Quick install

    First, let's describe a quick install. The other sections of this document go into the installation procedure in more detail, but you may find that you do not need this. If you want detailed instructions, skip to the next section. This section describes a basic installation, using a CD / DVD (or USB stick) as the install media.

  5. Booting NetBSD

    Boot your machine. The boot loader will start, which will print a countdown and begin booting. You may want to read the boot messages, to notice your disk's name and geometry. Its name will be something like sd0 or wd0 and the geometry will be printed on a line that begins with its name. As mentioned above, you may need your disk's geometry when creating NetBSD's partitions. You will also need to know the name, to tell sysinst on which disk to install. The most important thing to know is that wd0 is NetBSD's name for your first SATA/PATA disk, wd1 the second, etc. sd0 is your first SCSI disk, sd1 the second, etc.

    Once NetBSD has booted and printed all the boot messages, you will be presented with a welcome message and a main menu. It will also include instructions for using the menus.

  6. Network configuration

    If you do not intend to use networking during the installation, but you do want your machine to be configured for networking once it is installed, you should first go to the Utility menu and select the Configure network option. If you only want to temporarily use networking during the installation, you can specify these parameters later. If you are not using the Domain Name System (DNS), you can give an empty response when asked to provide a server.

  7. Installation drive selection and parameters

    To start the installation, select Install NetBSD to hard disk from the main menu.

    The first thing is to identify the disk on which you want to install NetBSD. sysinst will report a list of disks it finds and ask you for your selection. You should see disk names like wd0, wd1, sd0 or sd1.

    sysinst next tries to figure out the real and BIOS geometry of your disk. It will present you with the values it found, if any, and will give you a chance to change them. Normally, the values it presents will be correct.

  8. Selecting which sets to install

    The next step is to choose which distribution sets you wish to install. Options are provided for full, minimal, and custom installations. If you choose sets on your own, base, etc, and a kernel must be selected.

  9. Partitioning the disk

    If you want to use the entire disk for NetBSD, you can skip the following section and go to Editing the NetBSD disklabel.

  10. Editing the Master Boot Record

    You will be presented with the current values stored in the MBR, and will be given the opportunity to change, create or delete partitions. For each partition you can set the type, the start and the size. Setting the type to unused will delete a partition. You can also mark a partition as active, meaning that this is the one that the BIOS will start from at boot time.

    Be sure to mark the partition you want to boot from as active!

    After you are done editing the MBR, a sanity check will be done, checking for partitions that overlap. Depending on the BIOS capabilities of your machine and the parameters of the NetBSD partition you have specified, you may also be asked if you want to install newer bootcode in your MBR. If you have multiple operating systems on the disk that you are installing on, you will also be given the option to install a bootselector, which will allow you to pick the operating system to start up when your computer is (re-)started.

    If everything is ok, you can go on to the next step, editing the NetBSD disklabel.

  11. Editing the NetBSD disklabel

    The partition table of the NetBSD part of a disk is called a disklabel. If your disk already has a disklabel written to it, you can choose Use existing partition sizes. Otherwise, select Set sizes of NetBSD partitions.

    After you have chosen your partitions and their sizes (or if you opted to use the existing partitions), you will be presented with the layout of the NetBSD disklabel and given one more chance to change it. For each partition, you can set the type, offset and size, block and fragment size, and the mount point. The type that NetBSD uses for normal file storage is called 4.2BSD. A swap partition has a special type called swap. Some partitions in the disklabel have a fixed purpose.

    a
    Root partition (/)

    b
    Swap partition.

    c
    The NetBSD portion of the disk.

    d
    The entire disk.

    e-p
    Available for other use. Traditionally, e is the partition mounted on /usr, but this is historical practice and not a fixed value.

    You will then be asked to name your disk's disklabel. The default response will be ok for most purposes. If you choose to name it something different, make sure the name is a single word and contains no special characters. You don't need to remember this name.

  12. Preparing your hard disk

    You are now at the point of no return. Nothing has been written to your disk yet, but if you confirm that you want to install NetBSD, your hard drive will be modified. If you are sure you want to proceed, select yes.

    The install program will now label your disk and create the file systems you specified. The file systems will be initialized to contain NetBSD bootstrapping binaries and configuration files. You will see messages on your screen from the various NetBSD disk preparation tools that are running. There should be no errors in this section of the installation. If there are, restart from the beginning of the installation process. Otherwise, you can continue the installation program after pressing the return key.

  13. Getting the distribution sets

    The NetBSD distribution consists of a number of sets that come in the form of gzipped tar files. At this point, you will be presented with a menu which enables you to choose from one of the following methods of installing the sets. Some of these methods will first transfer the sets to your hard disk, others will extract the sets directly.

    For all these methods, the first step is to make the sets available for extraction. The sets can be made available in a few different ways. The following sections describe each of the methods. After reading about the method you will be using, you can continue to the section labeled `Extracting the distribution sets'.

  14. Installation from CD-ROM

    When installing from a CD-ROM, you will be asked to specify the device name for your CD-ROM drive (usually cd0) and the directory name on the CD-ROM where the distribution files are.

    sysinst will then check that the files are actually present in the specified location and proceed to the extraction of the sets.

  15. Installation using FTP

    To install using ftp, you first need to configure your network setup if you haven't already done so. sysinst will help you with this, asking if you want to use DHCP. If you do not use DHCP, you can enter network configuration details yourself. If you do not have DNS set up for the machine that you are installing on, you can just press RETURN in answer to this question, and DNS will not be used.

    You will also be asked to specify the host that you want to transfer the sets from, the directory on that host, the account name and password used to log into that host using ftp, and optionally a proxy server to use. If you did not set up DNS, you will need to specify an IP address instead of a hostname for the ftp server.

    sysinst will then transfer the set files from the remote site to your hard disk.

  16. Installation using NFS

    To install using NFS, you first need to configure your network setup if you haven't already done so. sysinst will do this for you, asking you if you want to use DHCP. If you do not use DHCP, you can enter network configuration details yourself. If you do not have DNS set up for the machine that you are installing on, you can just press RETURN in answer to this question, and DNS will not be used.

    You will also be asked to specify the host that you want to transfer the sets from and the directory on that host that the files are in. This directory should be mountable by the machine you are installing on, i.e., correctly exported to your machine.

    If you did not set up DNS, you will need to specify an IP address instead of a hostname for the NFS server.

  17. Installation from a floppy set

    Because the installation sets are too big to fit on one floppy, the floppies are expected to be filled with the split set files. The floppies are expected to be in MS-DOS format. You will be asked for a directory where the sets should be reassembled. Then you will be prompted to insert the floppies containing the split sets. This process will continue until all the sets have been loaded from floppy.

  18. Installation from an unmounted file system

    In order to install from a local file system, you will need to specify the device that the file system resides on (for example wd1e), the type of the file system, and the directory on the specified file system where the sets are located. sysinst will then check if it can indeed access the sets at that location.

  19. Installation from a local directory

    This option assumes that you have already done some preparation yourself. The sets should be located in a directory on a file system that is already accessible. sysinst will ask you for the name of this directory.

  20. Extracting the distribution sets

    A progress bar will be displayed while the distribution sets are being extracted.

    After all the files have been extracted, the device node files will be created. If you have already configured networking, you will be asked if you want to use this configuration for normal operation. If so, these values will be installed in the network configuration files.

  21. Configure additional items

    The next menu will allow you to select a number of additional items to configure, including the time zone that you're in, to make sure your clock has the right offset from UTC, the root user's shell, and the initial root password.

    You can also enable installation of binary packages, which installs the pkgin(1) tool for managing binary packages for third-party software. This will feel familiar to users of package tools such as apt-get or yum. If you prefer to install third-party software from source, you can install the pkgsrc(7) tree.

    Finally, you can enable some daemons such as sshd(8), ntpd(8), or mdnsd(8).

  22. Finalizing your installation

    Congratulations, you have successfully installed NetBSD 9.1. You can now reboot the machine and boot NetBSD from hard disk.


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 properly configured state. The most important steps are described below.

  1. Before all else, read postinstall(8).

  2. Configuring /etc/rc.conf

    If you or the installation software haven't done any configuration of /etc/rc.conf (sysinst normally will), 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 file system (/) mounted read-only. When the system asks you to choose a shell, simply press RETURN to get to a /bin/sh prompt. If you are asked for a terminal type, respond with vt220 (or whatever is appropriate for your terminal type) and press RETURN. You may need to type one of the following commands to get your delete key to work properly, depending on your keyboard:
           # stty erase '^h'
           # stty erase '^?'
    At this point, you need to configure at least one file in the /etc directory. You will need to mount your root file system read/write with:
           # /sbin/mount -u -w /
    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. Default values for the various programs can be found in /etc/defaults/rc.conf, where some in-line documentation may be found. More complete documentation can be found in rc.conf(5).

    When you have finished editing /etc/rc.conf, type exit at the prompt to leave the single-user shell and continue with the multi-user boot.

    Other values that may need to be set in /etc/rc.conf for a networked environment are hostname and possibly defaultroute. You may also need to add an ifconfig_int for your <int> network interface, along the lines of


           ifconfig_wm0="inet 192.0.2.123 netmask 255.255.255.0"

    or, if you have myname.my.dom in /etc/hosts:


           ifconfig_wm0="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.

    Instead of manually configuring networking, DHCP can be used by setting dhcpcd=YES in /etc/rc.conf.

  3. Logging in

    After reboot, you can log in as root at the login prompt. If you didn't set a password in sysinst, there is no initial password. You should create an account for yourself (see below) and protect it and the ``root'' account with good passwords. By default, root login from the network is disabled (even via ssh(1)). One way to become root over the network is to log in as a different user that belongs to group ``wheel'' (see group(5)) and use su(1) to become root.

  4. Adding accounts

    Use the useradd(8) command to add accounts to your system. Do not edit /etc/passwd directly! See vipw(8) and pwd_mkdb(8) if you want to edit the password database.

  5. The X Window System

    If you installed the X Window System, you may want to read the chapter about X in the NetBSD Guide:

  6. Installing third party packages

    If you wish to install any of the software freely available for UNIX-like systems you are strongly advised to first check the NetBSD package system, pkgsrc. pkgsrc automatically handles any changes necessary to make the software run on NetBSD. This includes the retrieval and installation of any other packages the software may depend upon.

  7. Misc

Upgrading a previously-installed NetBSD System

The easiest way to upgrade to NetBSD 9.1 is with binaries, and that is the method documented here.

To do the upgrade, you must have one form of boot media available. You must also have at least the base and kern binary distribution sets available. Finally, you must have sufficient disk space available to install the new binaries. Since files already installed on the system are overwritten in place, you only need additional free space for files which weren't previously installed or to account for growth of the sets between releases.

Since upgrading involves replacing the kernel, boot blocks, and most of the system binaries, it has the potential to cause data loss. You are strongly advised to back up any important data on the NetBSD partition or on another operating system's partition on your disk before beginning the upgrade process.

The upgrade procedure is similar to an installation, but without the hard disk partitioning.

Fetching the binary sets is done in the same manner as the installation procedure; refer to the installation part of the document for help. File systems are checked before unpacking the sets.

After a new kernel has been copied to your hard disk, your machine is a complete NetBSD 9.1 system. However, that doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade process. You will probably want to update the set of device nodes you have in /dev. If you've changed the contents of /dev by hand, you will need to be careful about this, but if not, you can just cd into /dev, and run the command:

       # sh MAKEDEV all

sysinst will attempt to merge the settings stored in your /etc directory with the new version of NetBSD using the postinstall(8) utility. However, postinstall(8) is only able to deal with changes that are easily automated. It is recommended that you use the etcupdate(8) tool to merge any remaining configuration changes.

Compatibility Issues With Previous NetBSD Releases

Users upgrading from previous versions of NetBSD may wish to bear the following problems and compatibility issues in mind when upgrading to NetBSD 9.1.

Note that sysinst will automatically invoke

postinstall fix
and thus all issues that are fixed by postinstall by default will be handled.

A number of things have been removed from the NetBSD 9.1 release. See the ``Components removed from NetBSD'' section near the beginning of this document for a list.

Using online NetBSD documentation

Documentation is available if you installed the manual distribution set. Traditionally, the ``man pages'' (documentation) are denoted by `name(section)'. Some examples of this are

The section numbers group the topics into several categories, but three are of primary interest: user commands are in section 1, file formats are in section 5, and administrative information is in section 8.

The man command is used to view the documentation on a topic, and is started by entering man [section] topic. The brackets [] around the section should not be entered, but rather indicate that the section is optional. If you don't ask for a particular section, the topic with the lowest numbered section name will be displayed. For instance, after logging in, enter


       # man passwd

to read the documentation for passwd(1). To view the documentation for passwd(5), enter


       # man 5 passwd

instead.

If you are unsure of what man page you are looking for, enter


       # apropos subject-word

where subject-word is your topic of interest; a list of possibly related man pages will be displayed.

Administrivia

If you've got something to say, do so! We'd like your input. There are various mailing lists available via the mailing list server at majordomo@NetBSD.org. See
       https://www.NetBSD.org/mailinglists/
for details.

There are various mailing lists set up to deal with comments and questions about this release. Please send comments to: netbsd-comments@NetBSD.org.

To report bugs, use the send-pr(1) command shipped with NetBSD, and fill in as much information about the problem as you can. Good bug reports include lots of details.

Bugs also can be submitted and queried with the web interface at
       https://www.NetBSD.org/support/send-pr.html

There are also port-specific mailing lists, to discuss aspects of each port of NetBSD. Use majordomo to find their addresses, or visit
       https://www.NetBSD.org/mailinglists/

If you're interested in doing a serious amount of work on a specific port, you probably should contact the `owner' of that port (listed below).

If you'd like to help with NetBSD, and have an idea as to how you could be useful, send us mail or subscribe to: netbsd-users@NetBSD.org.

As a favor, please avoid mailing huge documents or files to these mailing lists. Instead, put the material you would have sent up for FTP or WWW somewhere, then mail the appropriate list about it. If you'd rather not do that, mail the list saying you'll send the data to those who want it.

Thanks go to

All product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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This software was developed by Holger Veit and Brian Moore for use with "386BSD" and similar operating systems. "Similar operating systems" includes mainly non-profit oriented systems for research and education, including but not restricted to "NetBSD", "FreeBSD", "Mach" (by CMU).
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open Group, have given us permission to reprint portions of their documentation.

In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions of the system documentation.

Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form in NetBSD, from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between these versions and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document.

The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html.

This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.

In the following statement, "This software" refers to the parallel port driver:

This software is a component of "386BSD" developed by William F. Jolitz, TeleMuse.

Some files have the following copyright:

Mach Operating System
Copyright (c) 1991,1990,1989 Carnegie Mellon University
All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its documentation is hereby granted, provided that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of the software, derivative works or modified versions, and any portions thereof, and that both notices appear in supporting documentation.

CARNEGIE MELLON ALLOWS FREE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IN ITS CONDITION. CARNEGIE MELLON DISCLAIMS ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Carnegie Mellon requests users of this software to return to
Software Distribution Coordinator or Software.Distribution@CS.CMU.EDU
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890

any improvements or extensions that they make and grant Carnegie the rights to redistribute these changes.

Some files have the following copyright:

Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 Carnegie-Mellon University.
All rights reserved.

Author: Chris G. Demetriou

Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its documentation is hereby granted, provided that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of the software, derivative works or modified versions, and any portions thereof, and that both notices appear in supporting documentation.
CARNEGIE MELLON ALLOWS FREE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IN ITS "AS IS" CONDITION. CARNEGIE MELLON DISCLAIMS ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Carnegie Mellon requests users of this software to return to
Software Distribution Coordinator or Software.Distribution@CS.CMU.EDU
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890

any improvements or extensions that they make and grant Carnegie the rights to redistribute these changes.

Some files have the following copyright:

Copyright 1996 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies. Stanford University makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

The End