>on 12/10/05 1:17 PM, Donald Lee at MacPPC1@caution.icompute.com wrote:
>
>> I counsel caution.  MacPPC serial has historically been less than
>> completely reliable.  It has been "good enough" for console, but
>> that's about it, and as far as I can tell, not reliable for that.
>> 
>> I'm hoping that the improvements in 2.1/3.0 help.
>> 
>> -dgl-
>> 
>
>You've pretty much reached the same conclusions that I've reached in trying
>to use Apple PPC hardware for anything other than Mac OS.   The hardware is
>incredibly buggy and the open firmware is a freakin' nightmare.   An what
>about with Mac OS?   Well, if you're using the Classic Mac OS, it's about as
>stable as nitroglycerine and prone to frequent crashes, freezes, and
>lockups.
>
>What's really sad about this is that I used to be a big Apple supporter
>because I truly believed in their products.   I can tell ya that I'm quite
>disillusioned and I seriously doubt that I'll be buying anymore Apple
>hardware.  I might buy the odd little gizmo to improve what I already have
>-- additional memory or bigger hard drives, etc, but I'm pretty much
>finished with the Apple offerings.
>
>Just my two cents.

My comments are limited to serial support with NetBSD on MacPPC.

NetBSD 68K mac serial support was rock solid.  I used it for dialup service 
for some time. (years)

built-in MacPPC serial has been little used from day 1.  I went to a Cyclades
8-port serial card for serial, and that worked (is working...) fine for
years, though I had to tweak the driver to make it reliable.

With serial, I think the main problem is that it is just not used much, so
few people care enough to make it work.

Mac OS 9 and X are not the subject matter here.

-dgl-