At 3:49 PM +1000 8/22/00, Luke Mewburn wrote:

:)i am considering obtaining a powerbook for use as a netbsd laptop
:)(mmm, 10 hour runtime), and i'm curious about a few things
:)
:)a) what's people's experiences with the newer powerbooks in general?

Works, but X11R6 is slow and only 8 bpp, supports essential features
(ethernet, and usb), but other stuff is still either unknown or not
supported (sound, firewire, built-in modem, media bay)

:)b) does netbsd run well on them? what about with x11?

I haven't played enough with it, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as fast
as the hardware merits.  AFAIK, there's no way to emulate additional mouse
buttons, so you'll need a three-button USB mouse.

The X11 in macppc currently uses the OpenFirmware driver, so it's slow and
doesn't support any features of the nice ATI chip in it (i.e. can't change
resolution or bit depth, no acceleration).  There has been talk of xfree86
and direct pci/agp support of framebuffers (someone even got it to work,
but hasn't committed the code).

:)c) is it easy to multiboot between MacOS (9, X, whatever) and NetBSD?

Not difficult to boot one or the other, but sharing a drive between MacOS
and NetBSD is still a work in progress -- they're still hammering out the
details of the disk layout.

:)d) according to the netbsd www pages we don't support the firewire
:)powerbooks yet. any idea how this is going?

I need to update that -- Tsubai Masanari recently added the code for it.  I
got my firewire powerbook to netboot, start multi-user and allow me to
telnet in.  The built-in keyboard doesn't work (SUNAGAWA Keiki is looking
into this for iBook), and the media bay doesn't work (you have to remove
the DVD drive).  There's no OS-wide power-saving features (other than built
into the G3 chip) or suspend/resume.  There's also a bit of a question as
to whether one can use the internal hard drive to boot and run NetBSD from
(something to do with OpenFirmware mucking the ATA controller and NetBSD
not properly re-initializing it).

If you need a unix-only laptop, I'd have to reccommend a x86, as it has
much better hardware support (unless you're willing to hack on it ;).  If
you possibly want to run MacOS and some unix and can wait, work on, or work
around the keyboard/disk sharing/disk booting issues, get it -- it's
amazing for MacOS.  If you need blazing laptop speed, the 500 MHz G3 beats
any wintel laptop I've run across at any price.  The hardware is good,
MacOS and soon MacOS X run on it very well.  It's a nice design, and the
price is rapidly dropping (rumor mill says Apple's releasing a new laptop
in a few months).

As for 10 hours, I've never seen that.  I get ~4 hours of pounding on my
firebook (2.5 playing a DVD) under MacOS.  Two batteries only gives 8.  If
you're good about power consumption, 10 might be possible with two
batteries, but you'd have to be really careful (and leave it idle for some
of those hours).

Have fun,
  -- MW