> From what I've heard, you can't run MacBSD on an 040 Mac. Someone correct 
> me if I'm worng.

This is correct.

> Second, I don't think MacLinux is available at all, even in beta.

This, also, is correct.

> Drawing from my Linux experience on the 486 side and my MacBSD experience 
> on the Mac side, here's a few pros and cons...

Heh.  That's not a fair comparison.  Linux is much more mature on
the 486 than BSD is on the Mac.  What is a fair comparison?  Maybe
Linux/amiga and NetBSD/amiga or Linux/i386 and NetBSD/i386...  But
we don't want to get into that...

> There's a few other things that mad MacBSD less than perfect for me. No 
> NFS mounting for install, no working, solid ethernet support, and a few 
> others.

You're welcome to help fill in the documentation and make it more
consistent.  You are certainly qualified to let us know where the
inconsistencies are and supply some suggestions for what would help
make the process more clear for you.

If anyone would like to coordinate documentation efforts, I'd love
to hear from him or her.  We need input from novice and expert people
to improve the installation and configuration of the system.  It sounds
like people over on macbsd-development are ready to take up the task of
improving the software side of things--documentation would be nice,
too.

> I have nothing I can contribue technically. When I want to insuall Linux 
> of BSD on either my Mac or my PC, I want a system that's ready to go, 
> more or less. I'm not good enough, not motivated enough, to deal with 
> MacBSD on my machine at this point in time. Maybe you are. If so, go for it.

I think that the documentation suggests (it at least used to) that
MacBSD is not for the novice user, yet.  It's _real_ rough around the
edges.  FreeBSD and NetBSD/i386 are much more polished and are much more
functional.  I'm hoping that NetBSD/mac68k will reach that point, but I
can't do it by myself.  ;-)

> I'm sure most of the people on this list have. Which makes me 
> sort of a "devil's advocate".

Actually, I doubt it.  There are a lot of problems that have left a
number of people sort of stranded with non-working or partly-working
installations.

Anyway, with that said, there are a number of people who do have
working systems and the working system is quite nice and useful
with a full range of standard BSD tools, file systems and applications,
SUNOS (m68k) compatibility, monochrome (color sometime) X windows, etc.  

The system is also far from dead.  We're actively working to improve
it, and I'm hoping to be able to spend a lot more time on it this spring
than I have in quite a while, so I think we'll start to see more of
it coming together.

Cheers,
-allen

-- 
Allen Briggs - end killing - allen.briggs@vt.edu ** MacBSD == NetBSD/mac68k **