Hello all,

I've been a user of RiscBSD for quite a while now, and are also subscribed
to this mailing list. However, I haven't followed this list or the 
development of RiscBSD in general for quite a while (several months,
I believe), so I would like to ask for an update on the development
that's hopefully taken place in some areas. 

Forgive me that I don't search through all the messages myself, but 
there're literally hundreds of unread articles.

Originally, I've given up with RiscBSD, only recently I found it was
quite usefull (for TeXing, emacs+tetex+xdvi is simply better than 
anything on RiscOS - once it's all up and running).

Some things I would like to know are:

- Is the powertec v1 scsi controller supported in a fast-ish way now ?
  Or rather a non-kerneltime-hogging way at least ?
  If not (I suppose so), I think it's still possible to use an IDE 
  disc, and that'll be faster IIRC ? Or alternatively, I guess it's 
  possible to use a PC Linux server, will that be faster and/or less
  CPU-hogging ? And would it be possible to boot from the net ?
- Is it now, with reasonable experience and work put into it, 
  possible to get a working compiler toolchain ? With my current 
  install it wasn't possible to get a working (C++) setup 
  (that's 1.2G with some compiler patches, I think).
- Is Netscape (or QTscape) available ? Is it free and/or available 
  in executable form ? Is it fast enough to be usable (SA RPC, 42MB) ?
- Also, can you use highcolour now under X, and can you still switch to 
  the console ?

On a related topic: Chaltech's motherboard, how fast is it ? I don't 
mean the CPUs clock frequency, but how many (sequential) MB/sec you
get over the RAM bus, the PCI bus ? How's the EIDE interface, how's
SCSI and network cards ? Just out of interest.

That's it for now, I think.
  
Kind regards,  
  
-- 
Thomas Boroske