"Carlos A. Paramio" <carlosparamio@ono.com> writes:

> I've purchased an iBook (newworld) on Dec 2002. I would like to
> test other *BSDs on it, because MacOS X performance is a little
> slow. If anybody has tested it with NetBSD... Could you answer me
> to these questions?

I have a iBook (dual USB) from June 2001, and I've been using NetBSD
on it daily since then.

> 1. How about hardware support? I mean... all ibook devices works
>    well with NetBSD? Which of them doesn't work? And how about
>    power management (sleep, snooze, etc)?

USB, firewire, ethernet, AirPort, and the various optical disk options
work.

Power management pretty much consists of CPU temperature measurement,
battery/line measurement, and disk spindown. There's no sleep/suspend
or screen dimming/blanking.

The modem on older models can be made to work with a patch. Newer
models appear to have a software-DSP modem that we don't support.

Audio doesn't work. The information is out there, more or less, but
nobody's written the driver. I've been using a Griffin iMic when I
really needed audio.

> 2. Is NetBSD ready for the desktop on this machines class? For
>    example... KDE 3.x and/or Gnome 2.x works well?

KDE seemed fine when I tried it, and the couple of Gnome apps I use
(gnumeric and galeon) seem fine, though my desktop environment is
generally more minimal that KDE or Gnome.

> 3. What about performance in an iBook (G3) + NetBSD combination?

I find it reasonably fast for a portable box. X performance is
certainly much better than Aqua, especially for text.

        - Nathan