This is a quickie guide I wrote for someone which may serve someone else trying
to boot strap BSD 4.3 or 4.4 without an existing OS
--snip--
OK, I finally got a chance to look at the AOS Miniroot, and it looks like it
might be easiest to do the install manually from the shell it gives you.
The disk (NOT an image of the disk but the actual files you can peruse) are
on ftp.snurgle.org in /pub/rt/aos-4.3/mini.tar.  If you look at the
/etc/init and /restore.net scripts it should become obvious how the install
goes about.  It gets the network up and then rsh's to the destination
machine and executes a dump of a filesystem.  This is obviously silly...what
you probably want to do is boot the disk, drop to a shell and do something
like (Im not too familiar with rsh so this may not be 100%)
<Make your partitions with the sautil disk...___use the AOS version, not the
BSD 4.4 version___>
<Boot the miniroot and drop to a shell>
cd /
mkfs foo                   # make your filesystems
mount /dev/foo /mnt        # mount them
ifconfig foo foo foo       # set up network
cd /mnt
rsh -l griffon ip_of_linux_box gunzip -c root.dump.gz | restore xf -
That should get you the root filesystem.  You should be able to repeat for
usr and var (the three tapes BSD 4.4 comes in).  BSD 4.4 uses the same
partitioning and filesystem stuff as 4.3 (within reason...4.4 fsck will fix
the fses up a bit first time it runs through them).
On other fronts, I just solved the big imake problem I was having with
X11R5, so I should be able to get X11 built for 4.4 within a week or so.
Hope this helps.  I'll probably be trying something like this just for kicks
within the next month.
Hope this helps.  Lemme know if you hit any snags (or if you've given up and
I won't bother you anymore :) )
--snip--
