At 10:25 AM -0800 3/26/02, Michael Wolfson wrote:
>At 10:20 AM -0500 3/26/02, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
>
>:)It's supported and works moderately well. The things that don't work
>:)so well are mostly laptop features like sleep/wakeup, battery
>:)monitoring, video mirroring, and so on. But if you just want to boot
>:)the machine and run, it's fine.
>
>Also, the standard distributions of NetBSD will *not* work on PowerBook G4
>(Titanium) models with BootROM 4.1.8 which is just about all of them.  Only
>for the first few months did they ship with an earlier BootROM.
>
>You'll need to run a -current kernel.

I've been meaning to check this.  Is the problem just the keyboard 
ihandle vice ihandles inconsistency or is there a more fundamental 
problem?

I know I tried the last snapshot (late 2001 I think), and it didn't 
work.  There was an error message relating to the keyboard and it 
would hang before configuring any devices.  *sigh*

>:)As someone else mentioned, you might be happier with OS X if you want
>:)really good hardware support in a BSD-like universe. So you can buy a
>:)PowerBook knowing that you can fall back to OS X if NetBSD doesn't
>:)suit your needs.
>
>Agreed.  If you're just needing BSD stuff, Darwin is free and (as far as
>the BSD stuff goes) just as good as OS X.  Admittedly, some of the
>administration stuff is a bit ... weird (read netinfo) to a BSD purist, but
>it's a good OS.

Most TiBooks should come with OSX.  All the ones with BootROM 4.1.8 I 
think.  So getting a legal copy of OSX shouldn't be an issue.  I 
*think* you can download the Developer Tools if you sign up for a 
free ADC account with Apple.  Certainly that lets you download the 
Tools updates.

>I just need to get around to trying pkgsrc on Darwin.

FINK is a similar idea (based on the Debian package system I believe) 
and is much better supported by the Open Source community.
-- 
The opinions expressed in this message are mine,
not those of Caltech, JPL, NASA, or the US Government.
Henry.B.Hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu