The NetBSD install program sysinst will allow you to change the keyboard layout during the installation. If for some reason this does not work for you, you can use the map in the following table.

If you use a non US keyboard, you will need to change the keyboard layout after installation.

The installation program mentions two types of hard disk geometries; you should understand what they mean:

real geometry is the real geometry of the hard disk, detected by the system. BIOS geometry is the geometry used by the BIOS and it could be different from the real one (for example, BIOS could remap the disk using LBA).

The disk used in the installation example is an IDE disk with the following geometries:

real:  6232 cyl,   16 heads,  63 sec
BIOS:   779 cyl,  128 heads,  63 sec   (LBA)

As you can see the BIOS remaps the disk using LBA, effectively reducing the number of cylinders and increasing the number of tracks (but the result is the same: 6232 * 16 = 779 * 128 = 99712). A sector contains 512 bytes, which means that the disk size is 6232 * 16 * 63 * 512 = 3 GB. NetBSD does not need to remap the disk geometry (and in fact won't do it). During the installation it is possible to change manually the geometry if sysinst got it wrong.

The terminology used by NetBSD for partitioning is different from the typical DOS/Windows terminology; in fact, there are two partitioning schemes. NetBSD installs in one of the four primary BIOS partitions (the partitions defined in the hard disk partition table).

Within its BIOS partition (also called slice) NetBSD defines the BSD partitions using a disklabel: these partitions can be seen only by NetBSD and are identified by lowercase letters (starting with “a”). For example, wd0a refers to the “a” partition of the first IDE disk (wd0) and sd0a refers to the “a” partition of the first SCSI disk. In Figure 3.1, “Partitions” there are two primary BIOS partitions, one used by DOS and the other by NetBSD. NetBSD describes the disk layout through the disklabel.

Figure 3.1. Partitions

The space required by a NetBSD installation depends on the use that you plan to do with it (e.g. server or workstation). For example, consider a home desktop system with a 420 MB hard disk (rather small by today's standards) with X, the kernel sources and some applications (Netscape, ...). The swap partition is 32 MB. df shows the following:

Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd1a       31887    16848    13444    56%    /
/dev/wd1e      363507   173202   172129    50%    /usr

As you can see, NetBSD takes about 225 MB altogether and there are 120 MB left on the /usr file system for your and your users' files.

When you install an OS for the first time it is seldom a success and NetBSD is no exception. Even if everything goes well, as soon as you start using the system you usually realize that (for example) you could have chosen a better layout for your partitions. It is important not to give up; if you try again you'll realize that what was difficult to understand the first time gradually becomes clearer by virtue of the accumulated experience and numerous rereads of the INSTALL.* document.

During the first installations it is wiser to accept the defaults suggested by sysinst and avoid, for example, changing the disklabel.