NetBSD 2 Live! (Intl. Edition) NetBSD 2 Live! is Copyright (C) 2004 Jörg Braun & C&L - Computer und Literaturverlag GmbH The underlaying NetBSD 2 operating system is published under the NetBSD License: Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Copyright & Disclaimer: The operating system distribution on this cdrom is copyrighted by Jörg Braun . It may be redistributed without any further permission from the copyright holder except if the distributor is a German/Austrian/Swiss publishing house or a German Austrian/Swiss commercial software distributor. A German version of this cdrom based on NetBSD 2_Beta May 2004 is available. I is published in Germany as cover cdrom of the Unix administrators' magazine freeX issue 5/04 (August/September 2004). Commercial distributors in the German speaking area should resell this magazine if they want to distribute NetBSD 2 Live! German edition. It is hereby explicitely permitted that the cdrom distribution is distributed by members of the NetBSD Foundation on shows and conferences to support the NetBSD project even in the German speaking area. This international distribution is based on the German NetBSD 2 Live! distribution and also based on the earlier work on NetBSD Live! (for NetBSD 1.6), FreeBSD from CD (on FreeBSD 5.0) and OpenBSD Live! (based on OpenBSD 3.5). It was mastered and tested carefully on several personal computers with different i386 compatible hardware. It booted and ran without any problems on machines with AMD K6/2, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon, and Intel Pentium II processors based on motherboards from several vendors and from different cdrom drives by NEC, Toshiba, Mitsumi (and additionally with some noname drives). Nevertheless it cannot be guaranteed, that this distribution works on other than the tested machines. Because it is a read-only-medium based operating system, no adaption to unsupported hardware is possible. All parts of the operating system (kernel, programs) or the additional applications from the package source system of NetBSD are on a readonly distribution medium. The masterer of the distribution cannot give any guarantee that the functionality of this distribution will fit your needs. Few people reported problems when trying to boot from modern Intel Pentium IV and from few AMD Athlon based computers. All reported crashes were kernel based (the kernel could not find the boot cdrom drive) and not reproducable by me. The underlaying operating system may not run on a specific hardware configuration. Before sending a mail, that the cdrom or the distribution is defective, try to boot the cdrom on another personal computer with different hardware or try to use one of the other provided kernel files. NetBSD Live! 0.5, the cover cdrom of the German book »NetBSD 1.6« by C&L Verlag, did not boot on all possible hardware. Not all hardware is able to run a BSD system. Even a perfectly running Windows or Linux (or even a FreeBSD) does not imply, that NetBSD 2 Live! must boot correctly on this machine: It may or may not. If you downloaded NetBSD Live! from an internet location, test the checksum of the downloaded iso image if it traps when booting. Even good looking images may contain some irregular data. This cdrom contains an operating system which will not change any data on the built in hard disk(s) without explicit permission of the user. If the harddisk contains inconsitent data, do no use the swap partition and do not build a swap file on one of the partitions on the harddisk. Required hardware: i586/i686 compatible personal computer based on Intel Pentium/AMD K6 (i586 class), Pentium II/AMD Duron/ AMD Athon (i686 class) or better cpu (no i386 and i486 classes). Bootable cdrom drive (or compatible) as first cdrom drive on the ide bus (NetBSD drive cd0). VESA 2 compatible graphics card, which can display an X Desktop with a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. Optional: hard disk with NetBSD or FAT partition for swapping, network card sup­ported by NetBSD 2.0 for network/internet access. Network and Login: This distribution is basically network enabled. For this reason two users, the system administrator root and a normal user with the name user are defined. Both user accesses need a password, which is very simple: the user's name (root for root and user for user). It is impossible to destroy the read only based distribution so for a normal local login the root account can be used. Network access works very fine if a dhcp server is accessable. Otherwise the ip address and netmask for the system must be entered. The predefined data in the dialog (0.0.0.0/255.255.255.0) mean, that network access will be switched completely off. But be careful when entering different data, here! The definition of ip addresses twice in a network will result in problems and a very angry network administrator! You will run in problems, if you use a network card with DEC/Tulip 21041 chipset. The NetBSD driver for this card type seems to work incorrectly. I got no network access on several machines with those network cards built in. This problem is NetBSD-specific. All other operating systems (Windows, OS/2, OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD) get network access on the same set of machines without any trouble. The telnet server and the user based ftp server are switched on in the file /etc/inetd.conf. So you can use the cdrom for remote access (after the boot questions are answered correctly). For all remote accesses the normal user account user should be used. After the login and a su all administrative work can be proceeded. Again: the password for the administrator »root« is root, for the user »user« user (sorry). The user id of the user account ist 1000. To run X based applications from remote machines on the machine, where NetBSD 2 Live! runs, xhost + must be called in a xterm or KDE konsole window before. Remote X access is not predefined. System Date & Time: While booting, the timezone and biostime settings may be selected manually. Predefined are MEST (Europe/Berlin) and BIOS clock set to GTM. But this function is not well tested. Perhaps the time zone must be defined manually afterwards. Test it out. There is also no list for the time zone selection. You must know the name of your time zone. You should take a look at the folder /usr/share/zoneinfo and its subdirectories before booting (or perhaps on another machine). You must enter the correct name of the depending file in the dialog. If you are not sure, what to do, leave the input field empty (erase the predefined string Europe/Berlin). Then the startup script will use Factory. This no very nice time zone but it will work quite well for standalone systems. Swapping The system does not use a swap space even it finds it on the hard disk on boot time. A NetBSD swap space on the hard disk may be used but must be included manually with the swapon program of NetBSD. The line swapon /dev/wd0b includes the swap partition on the first hard disk (bios drive 80h) into the cdrom system and enhances the virtual memory. If the machine does not contain a NetBSD disklabel but a FAT partition, a swapfile may be used. Perform the following steps: 1.Open a console window and mount the partition or mount it via the icon on the KDE Desktop. To mount it manually, you must know the name in the virtual NetBSD disklabel. To get it, run disklabel, for example: disklabel wd0 2. If a FAT hard disk partition is detected, for example as number »f«, mount it: mkdir /var/mnt/hd0 mount -t msdos /dev/wd0f /var/mnt/hd0 3. Then call the script swapfile: swapfile /var/mnt/hd0 128 These steps will create a 128 mb swap file on the hard disk (you will see a small help screen if you run swapfile with the command line parameter »-?«). swapfile needs only the name of the directory. This version of the script will always use the name swapfile for the file and will use a default size of 128 MByte if no swap file size definition is given as second command line parameter. Security: The operating system on this cdrom permits full write and read access to all non-encrypted partitions on all built-in hard disks on the personal computer from which it is booted. It may be used to get write access on FAT, FFS/UFS1 (NetBSD, FreeBSD 4), EXT2, EXT3 (Linux), and read access to NTFS partitions. For this reason, the cdrom should be removed from the cdrom drive of any computer with physical access by other people. Additionally a bios password should be included into the boot process. Applications: The NetBSD2 Live cdrom contains a version of the NetBSD operating system version 2.0 with a kernel which boots exclusively from the first ide cdrom drive. All include files, man pages and the compiler programs in /usr/libexec and also the complete package database in /var/db/pkg are deleted in this distribution. All debuggung informations are stripped off the binaries. The cdrom boots with a special eltorito version of the boot loader GRUB. Three different kernel files are selectable: A slightly modified GENERIC kernel (see the file /stand/CDROM on the cdrom). An extended version of the ISDN kernel with additional ACPI support (see the file /stand/ISDN on the cdrom). A modified version of the NetBSD-laptop-kernel (see the file /stand/LAPTOP on the cdrom). The kernel files on the cdrom cannot be used to boot the operating system from the hard disk! You cannot use NetBSD 2 Live to install NetBSD 2 on the hard disk. Additional to the files belonging to the operating system itself, the following applications are included: XFree86 4.3 (libraries, clients, server, fonts exclusively 75 dpi). KDE 3.2.2 (libs/base, multimedia, games, addons, network, graphics). KOffice 1.3.1 (editor, spreadsheet, charting, presentation). Gimp 2.0, XV, and XPaint (pixel oriented graphics). Sodipodi 0.34 (vector oriented graphics). Dia 0.93 (workflow diagrams, uml). bash 2.0.5 (shell). Some useful console programs as Midnight Commander, joe, colorls, skill, ext2fs-programs, and mtools. The games »Digger«, »XMahjongg«, »XPipeman«, and »LBreakout 2«. For the graphical login kdm is used and as default graphical environment KDE 3.2.2 will be started. Alternatively the twm may be used. But this window manager is not very well configured. This cdrom contains neither OpenOffice nor Mozilla. OpenOffice needs about 250 MB space, Mozilla about 60 MB and the actual size of the cdrom is restricted to about 700 MB. KNOPPIX, the cdrom based Linux distribution uses a compressed file system and the Linux loopback device, it works completely different from NetBSD Live! where the files are located directly on the cdrom. This cdrom boots into a rockridge file system where Unix user file attributes are restored correctly. But it contains no Joliet extensions for MS Windows. For the support of long file names on a large number of operating systems (not only Unix derivatives) this cdrom contains long ISO file names based on ISO level 3. This means on the other hand, that the cdrom is completely unreadable on MS/PC/DR DOS and other antique operating systems.To master the cdrom again from the distributed files you need the following parameters of mkisofs 2.0 or higher: mkisofs -U -d -l -L -N -R -nobak \ -allow-multidot -iso-level 3 \ -max-iso-filenames -relaxed-filenames \ -no-iso-translate -allow-lowercase \ -hide-rr-moved -no-emul-boot \ -boot-load-size 30 -boot-info-table \ -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -o $targetdirectory/$filename.iso $sourcedirectory (for $sourcedirectory, $targetdirectory, and $filename.iso you must use the real paths and names where the data reside in your file system). When the iso image is built, you can burn it with cdrecord to a cd-r or cd-r/w. Important: Do not use the mkisofs parameter »-r«. It means, that the user- and group-names will be set to defaults. This is useful for backups, but the user account will not work with these defaults. And Finally: If you have further questions or suggestions about this NetBSD live cdrom distribution, drop me a mail. I also can sample further specific language versions for a small fee (I do not want to have costs for building distributions I do not need). Jörg Braun (jb@toolbox-mag.de)