NetBSD again

My attempt to install NetBSD on ska a few days ago failed because I had booted the wrong kernel. In the tapeimage directory of their archive, they provide a "kernel image" which really is a kernel plus a RAMdisk, and I had to use that one rather than trying to use the kernel-MVME167.gz which is in the netboot directory (hurray for clarity on that one)

After booting this thing, I have now been able to partition my disk — at least I think I have; edlabel isn't particularly helpful, allowing you to shoot yourself in the foot by creating overlapping partitions and the like, and of course it also uses its own internal partitioning format, like all the BSDs do. To make matters worse, however, there is, for example, a /dev/sd0a and a /dev/rsd0a, where the r variant allows for some sort of "raw" partition access. How ugly.

Now.

The installation instructions say that you create a system with a root partition on (r)sdXa and a swap partition on (r)sdXb; that you use dd to dump a miniroot.fs on the swap partition which you then boot from; and that you, finally, reboot the system into the miniroot.fs to allow for running sysinstall.

Only I get error messages. When trying to run dd with /dev/rsd0b as the output device, I get this:

# dd if=miniroot.fs of=/dev/rsd0b
dd: /dev/rsd0b: Read-only file system
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 0.018 secs (0 bytes/sec)
#

Trying to run "mount -u -w /" (which remounts the root filesystem in read-write mode) doesn't help either. Ghaah. Morons!

I guess I'm going to have to check out whether the NetBSD folks have some sort of user support mailinglist, then. But in any case, they've lost out a lot on me. It's not as if I'm unfamiliar with the hardware in question – I tested and fixed debian-installer on the very same box.