About this Document Quick install notes for the impatient What is NetBSD? 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 9.3 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
This document describes the installation procedure for
NetBSD
9.3 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.html.moremore(1)
and
less(1)
pager utility programs.
This is the format in which the on-line
man
pages are generally presented.
.txtYou are reading the HTML version.
This section contains some brief notes describing what you need to install NetBSD 9.3 on a machine of the i386 architecture.
Option 1: bootable CD-ROM images or USB images containing the full distribution.
These can be found
on an FTP site near you, usually located in the
/pub/NetBSD/images/
directory.
Check the list of
NetBSD
mirrors
for details.
Option 2: bootable CD-ROM images from
i386/installation/cdrom/.
These images are bootable, but do not contain binary sets.
They are intended for network installs or system repair.
boot.iso
is for VGA console installation, and
boot-com.iso
is for installation over serial console (com0, 9600 baud).
Option 3: boot floppy images from
i386/installation/floppy/.
boot1.fs
and
boot2.fs
are floppy images for VGA console installation.
boot-com1.fs
and
boot-com2.fs
are for installation via serial console (com0, 9600 baud).
To boot with ACPI disabled, interrupt the menu and enter the NetBSD boot prompt. Type boot -2 to boot with ACPI disabled.
i386/binary/sets/
directory.
When you boot the install
image, CD-ROM or floppies,
the installation program
can fetch these files for you (using, e.g., ftp)
if you have a network connection.
There are several other methods to get the binary sets onto
your machine.
You will at a minimum need
one of the kernel sets, typically
kern-GENERIC.tgz,
as well as
base.tgz
and
etc.tgz.
In a typical workstation installation you will probably want
all the installation sets.
Many commercial and freeware programs are available to burn CD-ROMs.
If installing via USB, you must first uncompress the USB image, which
is gzipped.
$ gunzip NetBSD-9.3-i386-install.img.gz
Next, write the USB image to a USB stick/drive.
Note that this will overwrite any existing data on the device that you
specify, so double check the device before running!
On
UNIX-like
operating systems, use a command similar to the following,
replacing
/dev/rsd0d
with the appropriate device for your system:
# dd if=NetBSD-9.3-i386-install.img of=/dev/rsd0d bs=32k
On Windows, you will need to use a program such as
Win32 Disk Imager,
or
Rawrite32.
If you have problems writing a raw image to a floppy,
the
rawrite.exe
MS-DOS program
in the
i386/installation/misc/
directory may be of help.
The media you just prepared will be used to boot the installation kernel, which contains all the tools required to install 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 9.3 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.
The NetBSD 9.3 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
9.3 release.
The complete list of changes can be found in the following files:
CHANGES
CHANGES-9.1
CHANGES-9.2
CHANGES-9.3
files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 9.3 release tree.
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.
groff(1).
Man pages are now handled with
mandoc(1),
and
groff(1)
can still be found in pkgsrc as
textproc/groff.
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/
Refer to
mirrors
The root directory of the NetBSD 9.3 release is organized as follows:
.../NetBSD-9.3/
CHANGESCHANGES-9.0CHANGES-9.1CHANGES-9.2CHANGES-9.3CHANGES.prevLAST_MINUTEREADME.filesimages/source/In addition to the files and directories listed above, there is one directory per architecture, for each of the architectures for which NetBSD 9.3 has a binary distribution.
The source distribution sets can be found in subdirectories of the
source
subdirectory of the distribu