VINO requires the following: Intel-class CPU, 486 or higher; 400 megabytes or so of disk space; 8 megabytes of RAM; working install of NetBSD already present. You must have at least 16 megabytes of swap space available in a separate partition. Supported hardware is largely the same as that supported by NetBSD, with some exceptions. This release will probably not run on oddball hardware.

Installation steps

1. Install NetBSD, if you haven't. Make a partition to hold VINO. Put this partition in the NetBSD disklabel. Write down (or remember) the partition name. For the purposes of this document we'll suppose the partition is "wd0f", although you can use any partition NetBSD knows how to find. For maximum compatibility with other things, including possibly future releases of VINO, list the partition in the fdisk partition table as well as the NetBSD disklabel.

2. Format the VINO partition. Use NetBSD's newfs, but you must set the block size to 4096 by using the -b 4096 option.

3. Mount the VINO partition. You will generally find that you want to have it mounted from NetBSD, so you will want to put it in /etc/fstab. We recommend using a mount point called "/vinoroot", although you can use whatever you like. (However, the cross-compiler in the binary snapshot looks in /vinoroot, so you'd need to rebuild it.)

4. Untar the binary snapshot (vino-0.40-bin.tar.gz) into /vinoroot. Be sure to use the -p option to tar to preserve file permissions. If you are installing entirely from source, skip this step.

5. Untar the source snapshot (vino-0.40-src.tar.gz) into /vinoroot/usr/src. If you don't plan to recompile anything, you don't need the source. However, since this is an alpha release, you'll probably want it.

6. If you are installing entirely from source, go to /vinoroot/usr/src, edit the DEFS file to suit your system (taking particular note of the HOSTARCH setting; if that is wrong, nothing will work.) Then run "./bootstrap.sh" in /vinoroot/usr/src. That builds the cross-compiler. When it completes it will tell you to do "make world". Note that you have to use the version of make it tells you to use - that one knows where to find the cross-compiler. "make world" takes a few hours. Cross-compiling works from NetBSD and from BSD/OS. It will probably work from FreeBSD with some minor tweaking. It will probably not work from other platforms, however. After the "make world" finishes, do "make installetc". This installs necessary files in /etc. Don't do this again later unless you want the password file reset to the default and stuff.

7. You need to install a bootloader that will boot VINO as well as NetBSD kernels. To do this, go into /vinoroot/usr/src/tools/boot/i386. Read "README.VINO" and do what it says. This needs to be done in NetBSD.

8. Uncompress the kernel snapshot ("vino.gz") in the NetBSD root directory. It has to be there for the bootloader to find it; if you put it in /vinoroot it won't work... NOTE: if you installed from source, move the kernel you compiled from /vinoroot/usr/src/vino instead.

9. Reboot; at the bootloader prompt type "vino" instead of "netbsd"; it should boot. It will ask you for the names of the root and swap partitions; for the root partition, give the name of the partition you formatted for VINO; for the swap partition, you should use the same swap partition NetBSD uses (typically wd0b or sd0b). Note that when VINO boots it first drops you into the "kernel shell"; type 'sh' in this to get a more normal single-user shell.

10. At this point you're done. If you like you can recompile the kernel and change compile-time settings, such as the default partition names. See Configuring and Compiling Kernels.

If these instructions lacked sufficient detail or didn't make sense, you probably don't want to be using this release of VINO. Hold your horses for the next one.