> I know next to nothing about Macs, but happen to have on here in my
> office. It's a Quadra 800, and I was hoping to install something like
> NetBSD on it. From what I gather on the various web pages, the 800 is
> not supported currently because of poor, or a lack of, SCSI drivers.
> Is this really the latest news?

Anthony-

Which web pages were you looking at that seemed to indicate this?  If 
it's the ones on www.netbsd.org, I'll be updating them soon.  If it's the 
ones on www.macbsd.com, then please let me know, since they should at 
least indicate that the SCSI problem on the 040-based machines is more or 
less solved now.  As the Quadra 800 has a full '040 processor in it, it 
should work just fine with NetBSD-current (assuming there aren't any ADB, 
i.e. keyboard and mouse, issues that I am not currently aware of).

I'd recommend the following:

1) Figure out which kernel is going to work best on your machine, most 
likely one of the latest from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/mac68k

2) Instead of downloading the 1.2 distribution binaries, go ahead and 
grab Steve Allen's latest set of tarballs (somewhere on ftp.macbsd.com, I 
can't remember off of the top of my head, and possibly on ftp.netbsd.org 
as well).

Go ahead and try a test boot with the kernel in question, and if it 
works, do an install and have fun!  As for the test boot procedure, check 
out the FAQ:

http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/macbsd-docs/faq/

I hope this helps.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                      ender@is.rice.edu
Consultant                                        Rice University
Information Technology Services                       Houston, TX