At 3:44 PM -0700 4/3/2000, Colin Wood wrote:
>Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:
>>  Howdy,
>>
>>  Some time ago, I started looking into the possibility of putting one of
>>  the free unix variants on an old pb160.  A query posted here received no
>>  responses (other than one or two other folks looking for the same
>>  information)...
>>
>>  Now that a more recent release of NetBSD is out, I wanted to check back
>>  and see if anyone here has experience with the pb160 and could give me a
>>  yea or nay on whether or not I'll be able to run NetBSD this machine.
>
>try a netbsd-current snapshot and see how it goes.  the netbsd 1.4.2
>release doesn't have any more machine support in it than did 1.4.  it's a
>bugfix release, not a feature upgrade.

NetBSD 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 run on my PowerBook 145B, albeit without 
support for the built-in video- which means I can't configure wscons 
to run and can't therefore run X.  But it works fine for command line 
shell stuff- and as a UNIX newbie this is fine.  It seems to be 
stable and runs for days at a time without a problem.  An issue for 
PowerBook use is that NetBSD doesn't seem to allow processor cycling, 
so my PB 145B runs significantly hotter than it does under MacOS.  If 
I understand correctly, there is a fix for the console for PB's in 
NetBSD 1.5 (is it in -current yet?).

FWIW, 1.4.2 (at least; 1.4.1 might have but I upgraded before I got 
it to work) supports the internal modem using Bob Nestor's pppd 
scripts.  I can use ping and ftp, although I can't seem to get either 
lynx or pine to run (both complain that libraries are missing).