Well, I intended to forward this a while back, but I'm just now
getting around to it.  In case it isn't clear, this means that CMU's
School of Computer Science has made NetBSD *the* "officially
supported" OS for PC's, which means that people and projects who buy
PCs will be running NetBSD on them.

This was posted to a CMU internal bboard way back in November.  A
little jargon explanation: a "misc collection" is a software package
or packages that are supported by the users at CMU, and is usually
made available for all of the various supported platforms.  A "GP
machine" is a machine that anyone in the department can get an account
on (GP means "general purpose", I think).

Newsgroups: cmu.cs.unix.announce,cmu.cs.facilities
Path: andrew.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!mja
From: mja@cs.cmu.edu (Mike Accetta)
Subject: PC Unix support result
Message-ID: <CznCsw.57J.1@cs.cmu.edu>
Followup-To: cmu.cs.facilities
Nntp-Posting-Host: titan.fac.cs.cmu.edu
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 21:12:31 -0500
Lines: 38
Xref: bb3.andrew.cmu.edu cmu.cs.unix.announce:230 cmu.cs.facilities:9

As those who attended the final discussion meeting earlier in the month
have already heard, the PC Unix evaluation process was narrowed down to
one of the BSD alternatives at that time.  This selection was
influenced substantially by the need to be able to leverage research
efforts off the supported computing environment and vice-versa, and the
fact that the BSD architecture was seen as the most suitable research
base by the research projects for which the underlying Unix
architecture was an important factor.

At the time of the meeting, the choice between BSDI and NetBSD was left
open, pending further consideration of AFS support, and the
costs/benefits of depending on net vs. commercially supported systems.
Since AFS support for BSDI is no closer now than it was then, a common
theme of the evaluation process was that free systems are better
supported by the net than commercial systems are supported by their
vendors, and there now appears to be sufficient research project interest
to foster development of local internals expertise in NetBSD to
supplement that available on the net, the supported PC Unix operating
system will be NetBSD.

Support for NetBSD will consist of the same set of basic computing
services provided for the 4 vendor operating systems, including
installation, distributed file systems, mail, netnews, windowing
interfaces, printing, zephyr, security, document production, and the
infrastructure needed for both staff and volunteer support of the most
popular misc collection application suites.  Support for the core
operating system proper, special device configurations and other
aspects that would normally be provided by the platform vendor beyond
that available on the net will be provided only on a case by case basis
as local resources permit.

Also, since there was substantial interest expressed in some assistance
for users running Linux, we will also provide interim partial support
in this regard until such time as it might be possible to fully support
multiple PC Unix systems.  This interim support will consist of a GP
Linux system, maintained with current copies of the most popular Linux
distributions from the net, and case by case consideration of specific
projects as they arise and resources permit.