I have a suggestion that some of you may (or may not ) want to hear.  A
friend of mine has a FreeBSD system and the installation procedure for
their latest release is *way* cool.

Basically, they install only the minimal set of binaries needed to perform
networking including a kernel built with all options (slip, ppp, ethernet,
or nfs, etc.). From there, you boot the system and an run an install script
which configures the networking options (i.e., slip, ethernet, ppp, etc)
and proceeds to install the rest of your system remotely.  It downloads the
binary/source distributions of your choice (ie, X, usrbin, secure libs, man
pages, dictionaries, games, etc.) and decompresses them  and installs them
automatically.  It virtually a seamless install and a nice interface.

This would eliminate the need for those of us with net access via
slip/ppp/ethernet to download the entire binary dist on the mac side and
then install.  But of course, things like adb-lockup and instabilities in
the networking code could potentially screw things up.

Now, I've only looked at the FreeBSD install scripts briefly, and do not
have the time to work on it for MacBSD (or even type this message, for that
matter), so I thought why not let you guys know about it.

Interested parties might check out the following:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/src/release/scripts/

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    jeff@apl.washington.edu
    206/685-8618