Procedure do Install NetBSD in a Macbook White 2006

Hello NetBSD,

I really like to contribute with you and I wrote one procedure how to
intall NetBSD 8.1 in a Macbook White 2006 like below

Installing NetBSD 8.1 in Macbook White - Late 2006 (A1181) in February 2020.

The first of all, it was a big challenger for me. The main ideia was to
install one soft Operating System in one very old Macbook.

The first thing was to identify which exactly hardware I had. Follow below
the Macbook White hardware specification:

Macbook White - A1181 (Late 2006)
CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz - T7200
Mem: 4 GB RAM - 667
EFI: 32 Bits

Even though the CPU is 64 Bits, the EFI is 32 Bits, this way only the 32
Bits Operationg System can be installed in this computer.

I installed the NetBSD 8.1 (i386) on the Macbook White, but the bootloader
didn't work. I saw many web pages saying that
i really needed to install an boot manager like grub, lilo, rEFInd and so
on.

The trick was choose the 'Entire disk' on the installation and to have sure
that it really had worked, when i boot the Macbook White with Install
CDROM, I chose the option 5 (Drop to boot prompt). You can see some
commands to test your environment like that:

? or help - help to familiarize with commands
dev - show you what exactly disk devices do you have
ls - list the files of a disk

For example:

The command dev probably will show you that your disk is hd0a(4.2BSD) and
hd0b(swap), if you use the ls hd0a:, probably you will see the kernel
(netbsd), so this way
you can boot using the command below, as showed on help message:

boot hd0a:netbsd

After this step you just need to fix the bootloader, try to install the
bootloader on your hard disk. To check your hard disk, try df -h. Probably
you have one wd0 disk:
installboot -v /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2

I tryed to follow the officil documentation about the rwd0c, but it didn`t
work, only the rwd0a worked.

The only problem that i had was my Ethernet Card (msk0 - Marvell 88E1111
Gigabit) that every time goes down and I needed to restart the card
(/etc/rc.d/network restart) or reconfigure the Ethernet Card using the
sysinst command.

Have fun! Enjoy it!

Regards,
Marcos Onisto
Mobile: +55 11 9 8446-7282
Skype: mlonisto
http://br.linkedin.com/in/marcosonisto