> From: Michael <macallan18@earthlink.net>
> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:33:03 -0500
> To: William Duke <wduke@cogeco.ca>
> Cc: Chris Tribo <ctribo@dtcc.edu>, NetBSD macppc <port-macppc@NetBSD.org>
> Subject: Re: 7200 Netbsd / Linux
> 
> Hello,
> 
>> I've no doubt that the onboard ethernet works fine, I'm just thinking
>> that a little more network speed, via a 100Mb NIC, would make the 7200
>> a little more viable as an X term.  I have 32MB of RAM in the 7200
>> right now, but I could easily double or quadruple that amount to 64 or
>> 128MB respectively.
>> Maxing out the VRAM should give me some good color at decent
>> resolutions, and a scant one or two gigabyte hard drive should be more
>> than sufficient for a decent X install.
> 
> Did you check if the onboard video chip is even supported by any Xserver
> we have? If it works as console you can use Xmacppc but that's limited
> to the resolution/colour depth something else, usually the firmware,
> sets up and it doesn't support any kind of acceleration.
> 
> If it's some ATI chip chances are it will work ( but don't hold your
> breath, Apple did some fairly weird things in early PowerMacs ), if it's
> some weird Apple chip you better find documentation and someone with the
> right combination of hardware, knowledge and time since XFree86 doesn't
> support any of these things.
> If the chip is unsupported you can still get a PCI graphics board, any
> PCI Mach64, Rage whatever, Radeon, Voodoo3 and probably others should
> work ( at least in -current) provided they have:
> - OpenFirmware ROMs
> - support OpenFirmware text mode ( the firmware images provided by
> Matrox don't, although at least for the Millennium I there /is/ a
> version that works. )
> - firmware that's compatible with OF 1.0.5 - some newer Radeon releases
> are known to cause problems here, downgrading to something older helped.
> 

No, I haven't looked into any of that yet.  I figured that I shouldn't get
too far ahead of myself.  What I mean, is that I figured it should probably
be best to determine if NetBSD will even run on the 7200, before I looked
into running X on the 7200.  (I want to run NetBSD whether it decently
supports X or not.)

I'm curious as to why the NetBSD community sticks to open firmware booting,
when the open firmware imposes so many restructions on so many Macintosh
models.   For example, my 7300/200 runs NetBSD just beautifully, but OF
limits my X usage to 256 colors at a maximum resolution of 640x480.  The
machine, as it sits, is capable of much higher resolutions and much greater
color depth.   

I guess I'm just wondering what advantages OF affords the NetBSD Mac
community?   Aside from the obvious shortened boot time and the unnecessary
Mac OS partition, what real advantages are there to using OF?