Hello,
    In a long-running effort to wean myself off of Windows, I have
settled on NetBSD as probably the "right" OS to transition my
daily computing life to.

Problem is, I want things to be easy and user-friendly, and I've
already gathered that NetBSD is not this :-)  I'm a long-time
UNIX user and programmer, so I'm not a totally clueless newbie,
but I know I will need help.

What I'd like is to have someone (at a fairly high guru level :-)
to "hold my hand" through the process of getting up and running
a basic system with X (done already), working modem/PPP, Mozilla,
email client (probably Sylpheed), GPG, and Japanese language
support.  After that I'll start to tackle TeX/ghostscript stuff,
but you can bail if you've had enough :-)

My system is a Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop, and I have had lots
of trouble with Linux and FreeBSD getting either the internal
Lucent winmodem or even a generic PC card modem to work.
I think there may be something weird about the PCMCIA bay in
the Tecra, and perhaps with all Toshiba laptops.  This is by
far the biggest and most crucial problem to solve.  I can handle
just about everything else myself after I can get the heck online.

I know how to find and read documentation, and how to do all basic
UNIX stuff.  I can and will do that.  What I would like is someone
to work with me 1-on-1 (via email, of course) to tackle the hard
stuff, and the NetBSD-specific arcana.

Any volunteers?

Thanks very much for your consideration.  Please respond to me
personally rather than to the list.

Dave