> I have just recently subscribed to your news group and all this
> talk about licenses has me asking the question is one required to
> run MacBSD?  I have not seen it mentioned in the README files but
> one of the comments made it sound like I might need one.

You don't need a license for MacBSD, or any other NetBSD port.  However,
you cannot take it out of the U.S. because the encryption algorithm
used with passwords is not exportable.  This should be fixed soon, I
think.

> The one problem that I have run
> into though is that I am using a mouse systems 3-button mouse as my
> Apple mouse started to get a bit jumpy.

I've got a 3-button mouse also.  I don't know if this is what's happening
to yours, but mine acts like a keyboard (so that middle and right buttons
can simulate the left and right arrow keys), and at MacOS boot time, the
mouse renumbers the real keyboard to another location.  I have to unplug
my 3-button mouse while MacOS is booting or I'll get a bunch of "D"'s when
in MacBSD.

> They have been the defacto standard on
> sun workstations for years.  Is there any hope of porting part of
> a sun driver to MacBSD to support this device?

MacBSD doesn't currently use mice at all.  Brad and I are rewriting the
console code, and it will support cutting and pasting with the mouse
(eventually).  We plan to support 3-button mice.  (Brad's new ADB will
also support renumbering, so you won't have to unplug it at boot time.)

> One other thing that would be nice is if you could partion the tar files
> so that they will fit on floppies.  To get the tar files onto my mac
> I had to parse the large tar files using dd and then wrote my own app
> to reconstruct the origonal files.

Yes, I agree that the tar files should fit on floppies.  Would 1.4M
be enough, or would everyone also want 800k? Compression support has
been added to the installer, so the next release may be considerably
easier to transport.  Plus, the installer already accepts split tar
files (thanks to Brad), so reconstruction is not necessary.

Lawrence

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