After a hiatus of several years, I'm back in the NetBSD camp. I had
gotten rid of my home computer  several years ago, for several reasons.
But I've just acquired a Celeron-400 and spent the last couple of  days
installing and configuring, and here are some of my notes/comments:

- I did an install over the internet. Had some initial troubles as my
ROM was shipped to not set up and allocate to the PCI devices (don't
remember the exact terminology). That took a bit of digging and should
be added to the i386 install instructions.

- The packages collection is absolutely fantastic. But I should have
gotten a CD-ROM of 1.4.1 because installing the binary packages with
dependent packages is a pain; unlike manually building the packages,
binary installation does not fetch the dependent packages as necessary.
I'd rather use the binary versions as they install much faster.

- The installation script was overall excellent. The fdisk'ing was a bit
of a pain -- do I really need to know the partition starts? Can't it
figure it out? The new boot-blocks look pretty snazzy, and I liked
having the script install the multi-boot automagically. Configuring the
various servers at the end of the install is a bit of a pain. Could the
installation process be modified to know of several standard
installation types with suitable defaults: workstation, server, ...? I
can't remember the ones in particular now, but did strike me that "this
could have been done for me" at the time.

- SuperProbe failed out of the box -- there's no /dev/vga or /ttyv0. At
least, they're not configured with the generic kernel. So I went and
recompiled my own kernel.

- the BSDI Netscape binary was extremely unstable: it would leave X
artifacts on the screen (stray buttons, frames, etc.) Switching to the
Linux version is much better.


So I'm a pretty happy camper now. NetBSD certainly feels much more
polished and integrated than Linux (installed on my little firewall as I
had a friend's CDs conveniently available -- I'm contemplating replacing
it). And the Linux emulation is pretty sweet. I do have some questions
remaining; maybe someone here might have some answers:

- My Ensoniq PCI card isn't being recognized at boot, nor is the power
management stuff. The boot messages say (reformatted for prettiness):

    Intel 82371AB Power Management Controller (PIIX4) (miscellaneous
    bridge, revision 0x02) at pci0 dev 4 function 3 not configured
   Ensoniq AudioPCI 97 (audio multimedia, revision 0x06) at pci0 dev 10
   function 0 not configured

    I haven't looked much into this yet (more pressing problems).

- I've tried to compile Wine 991031 and, with the occasional fix here
and there, managed to get through until the linking stage. But the
linker, after chugging away for several minutes and impacting machine
performance (due to swapping I suppose), then cores with a SIGSEGV.
Thinking it might be hitting memory limits, I ran it as root with all
limitations off, to the same result. Unfortunately it doesn't produce a
usable core. Haven't looked into this too much -- I'll recompile a
debugging version of ld, and see what happens. Has anybody seen this
before?

- my firewall box, the aforementioned Linux installation, a 16MB 486,
has two SMC EtherEZ ISA cards, and acts as the gateway to our
cable-modem onto the internet. It's all running 10baseT, and there's
hardly any nework load. I'm getting pretty good bandwidth (up to
100kbytes/sec). But my roommate's box throughput fluctuates from
600bytes/sec to the rare 30kbytes/sec, and we have extremely bizarre
latency problems -- ping times, both internally and going externally,
fluctuate from 28ms to 1sec. Any ideas? Are the SMC cards lousy? I
remember back in the days of NetBSD 1.0 that Linux's TCP implementation
could really slow down when some RFC's option was enabled on packets.
I'm contemplating installing NetBSD on it too.

- Can anybody suggest a good mailer ("user agent"?) that uses IMAP, a
cut above Mail, not as dumb-looking as Pine, handles MIME, but
keyboardable (unlike Netscape Messenger)? Should I look at mh?

- Can anybody suggest a good audio ripper?

As a conclusion, I'm an extremely happy NetBSD user again. Thanks guys!