>Well, the key thing would be for NetBSD (and in particular sysinst) to be able to read and write to OF.  This way, sysinst could figure everything out and write the correct OF variables, reboot, and voila!  Of course, sysinst would also come with a "quirk table" of sorts where it asks if you have a particular model (guessing from available hardware) to avoid or explicitly specify certain settings.  Things like beige G3 not being able to boot from slave IDE HD, warning about PB 3400 ethernet not working, etc...
>
>Don't forget a pause for HDs to spin up, some means of breaking out of the boot process, and (too much to ask for) some means of selecting which OS to boot and a program to run from that other OS which sets up OF to boot NetBSD.

The current situation is really hard to document, as we've seen.
(Thank you, MW!)

The scenario above is really cool, but a lot of work.

Something in the middle is what we have, where folks have been working
hard to find those things that make life a little simpler, with
the resources/effort available.  All in all, I don't think it's so
bad.  I'm grateful for the progress we've seen since the days
that I could not boot my OF 2.4 Beige G3, and we were still confused
between the .xcf and .elf bootloaders. ;->

-dgl-