About this Document What is NetBSD? Dedication Changes Between The NetBSD 9 and 10 Releases Features to be removed in a later release The NetBSD Foundation Sources of NetBSD NetBSD 10.0 Release Contents NetBSD/alpha subdirectory structure Bootable installation/upgrade floppies Binary distribution sets NetBSD/alpha System Requirements and Supported Devices Supported PCI bus devices Supported ISA bus devices Supported EISA bus devices Supported TURBOchannel bus devices 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 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
10.0 on the
alpha
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.
The NetBSD Operating System is a fully functional open-source 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 10.0 release contains complete binary releases for most of these system architectures, with preliminary support for the others included in source form. For more information please visit https://www.NetBSD.org/.
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.
NetBSD 10.0 is dedicated to the memory of Ryo SHIMIZU, who passed away in May 2023.
Ryo's technical contributions are too many to list here in full. He was a long term contributor and worked on a lot of low-level code over various architectures, from x68k to aarch64. He also worked on various out-of-tree NetBSD items, like the IIJ git repository conversion.
The project lost an excellent technical contributor and many of us a good friend.
The NetBSD 10.0 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.
One important new feature in this release is the support for extended attributes and access control lists on FFS file systems.
For new installations the installer will by default disable these features, so the file system is compatible with older NetBSD releases (before 10), and allow other operating systems to mount this file systems at least in read-only mode.
If you want a new installed file system to support extended attributes,
change the file system type from
``FFSv2''
to
``FFSv2ea''
in the partitioning menu.
You can also convert file systems later, using the
fsck_ffs(8)
utility.
More details are available in
this guide.
If you are upgrading from a version of NetBSD-current please also check the Compatibility Issues With Previous NetBSD Releases.
It is impossible to completely summarize the massive development that
went into the
NetBSD
10.0 release.
The complete list of changes can be found in
CHANGES
CHANGES-10.0
which are also present in the top level directory of the
NetBSD 10.0 release tree.
groff(1).
Man pages are now handled with
mandoc(1),
and
groff(1)
can still be found in pkgsrc as
textproc/groff.
pf(4).
This packet filter is obsolete and unmaintained in
NetBSD.
It will be eventually removed due to possible long-standing
security issues and lack of multiprocessor support.
New installations should use
npf(7).
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 10.0 release is organized as follows:
.../NetBSD-10.0/
CHANGESCHANGES-10.0CHANGES.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 10.0 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:
config(1)
utility.
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:
MD5SHA512The 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.
alpha
subdirectory of the distribution:
.../NetBSD-10.0/alpha/.
It contains the following files and directories:
INSTALL.htmlINSTALL.psINSTALL.txtINSTALL.more.more
file contains underlined text using the
more(1)
conventions for indicating italic and bold display.
binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC.gznetbsd-GENERIC.QEMU.gzsets/installation/floppy/diskimage/cdhdtape
is included for the case where the installer is written to
a CD, hard drive, or tape.
This image file is the same for the CD, HD, and tape cases.
instkernel/netbsd.gz
installation kernel; this is the same installer kernel as in all the
other install
images, but without the various boot program and file system wrappers.
It can be netbooted or diskbooted from a previous installation.
no need to
gunzip
this image.
There are three bootable images in the
NetBSD
alpha distribution.
One is for a floppy boot and is split into three separate files.
The other is a single-file image containing the same install kernel,
but intended to be written to a CD, tape, or hard drive.
The third image is a
GENERIC
kernel intended for production use in unusual cases.
This can be useful at some sites when:
siop(4)
or
isp(4)
SCSI devices, and on most platforms will not
boot from an IDE drive.
NetBSD
will happily operate
with almost any SCSI root or an IDE root; the solution here is to netboot
a kernel or always boot from floppy.
alpha/binary/sets
subdirectory
of the
NetBSD
10.0
distribution tree, and are as follows:
/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.
/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.
GENERIC
kernel, named
/netbsd.
You
must
install this distribution set.
/usr/share.
/rescue.
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 XFree86 4.5.0. Binary sets for the X Window System are distributed with NetBSD. The sets are:
The alpha binary distribution sets are distributed as tar files
compressed with
gzip
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.
NetBSD/alpha 10.0 runs on most of the DEC Alpha PCI platforms, on all of the TURBOchannel models, on the high end 8200 and 8400 systems, and on the 4100 series.
The SRM console is required.
This
console can be distinguished from the ARC console (which is used to
boot
Windows NT)
by the fact that it has a command line interface,
rather than a menu-driven interface.
The SRM prompt is
`>>>'.
Some platforms have both the SRM console and
the ARC console, and can switch between them, and other platforms have
only one type of console loaded at any one time.
If your system comes up with the ARC firmware, it may be possible
to switch it to SRM with a menu or
to download SRM from
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware
You may want to buy a firmware update CD from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
More information on supported platforms and devices can be found on the alpha port web pages at http://www.NetBSD.org/
A basic system will fit on a 200 MB disk (including swap) without too much difficulty, but you will want considerably more space to have any level of comfort.
Although it is actually possible to boot and install NetBSD/alpha in only 16 MB of RAM, you will want to have at least 32 MB. We support add-in devices on the PCI, ISA, EISA and TURBOchannel buses. Because NetBSD has an extremely machine-independent device driver system, many device drivers are the same as used in other ports that use the same bus. For example, the de network card driver is shared by the i386 and alpha ports. Some drivers on inspection appear as if they will work on the alpha but have not been tested because that hardware was not available to NetBSD testers; these are marked as UNTESTED below. If you have one of these devices, and it does work, please get in touch with port-alpha-maintainer@NetBSD.org and let us know that it works. If it doesn't work, do the same thing and we can probably fix it pretty easily.
Note that some devices, especially ISA-based devices, have to have
certain settings set properly for the install and
Parallel ports lpt0 0x378 7 [interrupt-driven or polling]
lpt1 0x278 [polling only]
lpt2 0x3bc [polling only]
AHA-174x SCSI host adapters (in enhanced mode)
ahb0 any any any
AHA-2X4X or AIC-7xxx-based SCSI host adapters
ahc0 any any any
Bus Logic BT445, BT74x, or BT9xx SCSI host adapters
bha0 0x330 any any
bha1 0x334 any any
MFM/ESDI/IDE/RLL hard disk controllers
wdc0 0x1f0 14 [supports two devices]
wdc1 0x170 15 [supports two devices]
ATA disks wd0, wd1, ...
SCSI disks sd0, sd1, ...
SCSI tapes st0, st1, ...
SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROMs cd0, cd1, ...
For each SCSI and IDE controller found, the SCSI or ATA(PI) devices
present on the bus are probed in increasing ID order for SCSI and
master/slave order for ATA(PI).
So the first SCSI drive found will be called sd0, the second sd1,
and so on ...
3COM 3x59X or 3COM 3x90X PCI Ethernet boards
ep0 any any [you must assign an interrupt in your
PCI BIOS, or let it do so for you]
Intel EtherExpress 100 Fast Ethernet adapters
fxp0 any any [you must assign an interrupt in your
PCI BIOS, or let it do so for you]
DEC DE200,201,202 EtherWORKS II/Turbo ISA Ethernet boards
le? 0x300 5 memory at D0000-DFFFF
le? 0x200 10 memory at D8000-DFFFF
You should enter the following SRM console command to enable the
le device:
>>> isacfg -mk -slot ? -dev 0 -handle DE200-LE -irq0 5
-membase0 d0000 -memlen0 10000 -iobase0 300 -etyp 1 -enadev 1
DEC DE203,204,205 EtherWORKS III ISA Ethernet boards
lc0 0x300 any
lc1 0x320 any
You should enter the following SRM console command to enable
the device:
>>> add_de205
GENERIC
kernels to detect them.
(Once installed, you can always rebuild your own kernel
to detect them anywhere you wish, of course.)
Here is a list of such devices and the necessary settings:
Device Name Port IRQ DRQ Misc
------ ---- ---- --- --- ----
Serial ports com0 0x3f8 4 [8250/16450/16550/clones]
com1 0x2f8 3 [8250/16450/16550/clones]
com2 0x3e8 5 [8250/16450/16550/clones]
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.
binary/sets
and
alpha/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.
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.
/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.
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-10.0
# cd alpha/binary
# tar -cf tape_device kern-GENERIC.tgz base.tgz etc.tgz
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.
If you have any data on your disks that you want to keep,
back it up
before starting.
Note that
NetBSD/alpha
does not support booting more than
one operating system from a single disk, although it's fine to have
multiple operating systems on your machine if you have a separate
disk for
NetBSD,
or if one of them uses a network boot.
To install or upgrade NetBSD, you need to first boot an installation program and then interact with the menu-based program sysinst. The installation program actually consists of the NetBSD kernel plus an in-memory file system of utility programs.
The traditional procedure is to write the installation system to a floppy disk set and then boot from the floppies. However, there are six ways to boot the NetBSD/alpha installation system. Each approach loads the exact same installation bits. The six paths are:
In all cases, you need to transfer a
bootable image of the installation system
from the
NetBSD
CD or from an ftp site to the chosen media type.
Although booting from floppy is the usual path, the
hard drive boot is useful if you have another operating system (and a spare
drive) already installed, or if you don't mind swapping hard drives from
box to box.
CD and tape boots are nice and fast if you have a CD writer
or a tape format in common with another previously installed
UNIX-like
system.
Finally, most versions of SRM can locate the
NetBSD
boot program
netboot
via bootp and download it via tftp.
netboot
then mounts the root file system
(/)
via NFS and loads the kernel.
Note that if you are installing or upgrading from a writable media, the media can be write-protected if you wish. These systems mount a root image from inside the kernel, and will not need to write to the media. If you booted from a floppy, the floppy disk may be removed from the drive after the system has booted.
The 3.5", 1.44 MB boot floppy set is found under the
NetBSD/alpha
10.0 distribution directory in
alpha/installation/floppy/
as three files called
disk1of3,
disk2of3,
and
disk3of3.
You need to put these disk images on three floppy disks.
If you have a UNIX-like system handy, you can do this with commands like the following:
# dd if=disk1of3 of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k
# dd if=disk2of3 of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k
# dd if=disk3of3 of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k
If the
UNIX-like
system you are using is not a
NetBSD
system, you will probably need to replace
/dev/rfd0a
with the name of the floppy device on your particular system.
If you have an
MS-DOS
or
Windows
system available, you can use
the
rawrite.exe
utility to transfer the image to a floppy
disk.
This utility is provided with the
NetBSD/i386
install tools, under
i386/installation/misc;
a documentation file,
rawrite.doc
is available there as well.
Once the floppy has been made, you simply need to put it in the drive and type
>>> B DVA0
All three of these media types use the same initial image:
.../installation/diskimage/cdhdtape
The image can be written to a hard drive partition with a command
like:
# dd if=cdhdtape of=/dev/rsd0c bs=16k
To boot from a magnetic tape device such as DAT or DLT, it is important to create the tape image with 512-byte records. Use a command like:
# dd if=cdhdtape of=/dev/rst0 bs=512 conv=osync
If the host system is not NetBSD, the names of the destination devices are likely to be different. Be sure to use a ``raw partition'' device that doesn't skip over labels!
The use of CD-R devices varies greatly depending on the host OS and host software; it isn't possible to give typical instructions here.
The installation subdirectory
instkernel/
contains
netbsd.gz;
this is the same install kernel but without a bootable file system
image wrapped around it.
You can perform an complete reinstall by beginning it as an upgrade,
and booting this kernel in the normal way off the root file system
(/)
of a previous installation.
The gzipped image can be booted directly; it is not necessary to uncompress it first.
Booting NetBSD/alpha 10.0 over a network requires a BOOTP or DHCP server, a TFTP server and an NFS server. (These are usually all run on the same machine.) There are three basic stages to the boot:
/netbsd.
/)
via NFS and continues.
You will need to set up servers for BOOTP, TFTP and NFS.
If you want to run a full system
from the network, untar the
NetBSD
distribution into a directory on your server and NFS export that directory
to the client.
Make sure you put a kernel there as well, and create the device nodes in
/dev
with
sh ./MAKEDEV all.
Detailed instructions on netbooting can be found by visiting
http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/network/netboot/
You'll want to map root to
root
(rather than the default
nobody)
when you export your root file system
(/).
A typical
/etc/exports
line on a
NetBSD
system would be:
/usr/export/alpha -maproot=0 myclient.mydom.com
One option is to load just the install kernel over the network but then proceed to a normal disk-based install and disk-based operation. (Perhaps the alpha doesn't have a floppy drive, or you just don't want to use a Windows system to make the floppy; we understand.)
For this case, you still need to export an NFS root, but
the only thing it needs to have in it is the
instkernel
image from the distribution.
The gzipped image can be booted directly; it is not necessary to uncompress it first.
The console will be using TFTP to load the
NetBSD
boot program,
so for the TFTP setup, you need to copy the second stage bootstrap,
netboot,
into an appropriately named file such as
boot.netbsd.alpha
in the directory used by your TFTP server.
If you extracted a full snapshot, you can get the netboot program from
/usr/mdec/netboot;
if not, you can get this from the
installation/netboot
directory where you found the alpha distribution.
For the BOOTP server you need to specify the:
Here's an example for a UNIX-like system running bootpd:
myhost.mydom.com: :ht=ethernet:ha=0000c0391ae4:\
:ip=192.168.1.2:sm=255.255.255.0:\
:sa=192.168.1.1:bf=boot.netbsd.alpha:rp=/usr/export/alpha:
And here's an example for a UNIX-like system running the ISC dhcpd:
host axp {
hardware ethernet 0:0:c0:39:1a:e4;
fixed-address 192.168.1.2;
option host-name "myhost.mydom.com";
filename "boot.netbsd.alpha";
option root-path "/usr/export/alpha";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1;
option broadcast-address 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "my.domain";
}
The only Ethernet device the console on most alpha systems
knows how to boot from is the onboard Ethernet interface or a
DEC
Tulip (21040, 21041, 21140) PCI Ethernet card.
Some older SMC 100 Mbps cards that use this chip have been known to
work as well.
Many older systems will not be able to use the newer 2.0 stepping
of the 21140, however.
If your system appears not to be receiving packets, this may be the problem.
(You may or may not be able to update your firmware to fix this; see
http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/alpha/
for more information on this.)
In general, 10 Mb cards from manufacturers other than
DEC
will work, and 100 Mb cards not from
DEC
will not.
Once you're set up, you should be able to boot with:
>>> boot -proto bootp ewa0
You should permanently set your protocol to BOOTP with:
>>> set ewa0_protocols bootp
The 3000 series of TURBOchannel systems and certain other models use old SRM, do not have a -proto option and use different device names. They also tend to not netboot very well so you probably don't need to worry about this section. However, if you want to give it a try, note the following differences:
setnetbootinfo(8)
program will probably also be necessary, as it is unlikely that an SRM
from that era will properly communicate the ethernet HW address to the
boot program.
>>> boot ez0
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.
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).
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.
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 as the install medium.
>>> B DQA0
DQA0
may not be the proper device, depending on your hardware configuration.
.***********************************************.
* NetBSD-10.0 Install System *
* *
*>a: Install NetBSD to hard disk *
* b: Upgrade NetBSD on a hard disk *
* c: Re-install sets or install additional sets *
* d: Reboot the computer *
* e: Utility menu *
* f: Config menu *
* x: Exit Install System *
.***********************************************.
root
user when prompted by
sysinst,
logging in as
root
and setting a password should be your first task.
You are also advised to read
afterboot(8).
Boot your machine.
The boot loader will start, which will print a countdown and begin booting.
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.
If you do not intend to use networking during the installation, but you do want your machine to be configured for networking once the system 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.
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.
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.
You will be asked if you want to use the entire disk or only part of the disk. If you decide to use the entire disk for NetBSD, sysinst will check for the presence of other operating systems and you will be asked to confirm that you want to overwrite these.
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/)
bcd-hd
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Congratulations, you have successfully installed NetBSD 10.0. You can now reboot the machine and boot NetBSD from hard disk.
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.
postinstall(8).
/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_le0="inet 192.0.2.123 netmask 255.255.255.0"
or, if you have
myname.my.dom
in
/etc/hosts:
ifconfig_le0="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.
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.
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.
If you installed the X Window System, you may want to read the chapter about X in the NetBSD Guide:
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.
alpha/10.0/All
subdir.
If you installed
pkgin(1)
in the
sysinst
post-installation configuration menu, you can use it to automatically install
binary packages over the network.
Assuming that
/usr/pkg/etc/pkgin/repositories.conf
is correctly configured, you can install them with the following commands:
# pkgin install tcsh bash perl apache xfce4 firefox ...
The above command will install the Tenex-csh and Bourne Again shells, the Perl programming language, Apache web server, Xfce desktop environment and the Firefox web browser as well as all the packages they depend on.
If it was not automatically installed,
pkgin(1)
can be installed on a fresh
NetBSD
system with
pkg_add(1):
export PKG_PATH=https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -p)/$(uname -r | cut -d_ -f1)/All pkg_add pkgin
pkgsrc(7)
framework for compiling packages and did not install it from the
sysinst(8)
post-installation configuration menu, you can obtain it by retrieving
the file
/usr/pkgsrc
(though other locations work fine) with the commands:
# cd /usr
# tar -zxpf pkgsrc.tar.gz
After extracting, see the
doc/pkgsrc.txt
file in the extraction directory (e.g.,
/usr/pkgsrc/doc/pkgsrc.txt)
for more information.
/etc/mail/aliases
to forward root mail to the right place.
Don't forget to run
newaliases(1)
afterwards.
/etc/rc.local
to run any local daemons you use.
/etc
files are documented in section 5 of the manual; so just invoking
# man 5 filename
is likely to give you more information on these files.
The easiest way to upgrade to NetBSD 10.0 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
10.0
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.
Users upgrading from previous versions of NetBSD may wish to bear the following problems and compatibility issues in mind when upgrading to NetBSD 10.0.
Note that sysinst will automatically invoke
postinstall fix
In
NetBSD9
and earlier, filesystems listed in
/etc/fstab
would be mounted before non-legacy
zfs
filesystems. Starting from
NetBSD10
this order has been reversed.
If you have ever run a version of NetBSD-current between April 18, 2020 and September 23, 2022 (the version numbers used in the affected time range are between 9.99.56 and 9.99.106) your FFS file systems might have broken extended attributes stored.
You should follow this guide before booting the updated system multi-user for the first time.
Note that you do not need to do anything special if you never did run any affected kernel, especially if you have never run NetBSD-current.
The display drivers used for modern GPUs and the whole subsystem supporting it (DRM/KMS) have been updated to a newer version. Unfortunately not all issues with this have been resolved before the NetBSD10.0 release. You can find a list of issues in the Open issues with new DRM/KMS section of the release engineering wiki page.
A number of things have been removed from the NetBSD 10.0 release. See the ``Components removed from NetBSD'' section near the beginning of this document for a list.
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
intro(1),
man(1),
apropos(1),
passwd(1),
and
passwd(5).
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.
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.
Keith Bostic Ralph Campbell Mike Karels Marshall Kirk McKusick
for their work on BSD systems, support, and encouragement.
All product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
The following notices are required to satisfy the license terms of the software that we have mentioned in this document:
NetBSD is a registered trademark of The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.
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:
Some files have the following copyright:
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
any improvements or extensions that they make and grant Carnegie the
rights to redistribute these changes.
Some files have the following copyright:
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 requests users of this software to return to
any improvements or extensions that they make and grant Carnegie the
rights to redistribute these changes.
Some files have the following copyright:
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.
Copyright (c) 1991,1990,1989 Carnegie Mellon University
All Rights Reserved.
Software Distribution Coordinator or Software.Distribution@CS.CMU.EDU
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890
All rights reserved.
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.
Software Distribution Coordinator or Software.Distribution@CS.CMU.EDU
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890