On Jun 23, 2006, at 3:30 PM, Brian Durant wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am a total newbie that would like to install BSD on my Apple G3  
> PDQ. I have looked at the archives and at the supported hardware  
> list. It seems like it should be possible, but it would be great if  
> someone could post some links on installing BSD and how to tackle  
> the OpenFirmware. I noticed that it may (??) be possible to boot a  
> BSD install CD and install without having to use BootX, which would  
> be great as I would like to be able to run my PDQ as a desktop that  
> only has BSD on it.

Not only is it possible to run without BootX, it's required if you  
want to use sysinst.

Frankly though, having run one of these machines myself, there is  
little reason to run NetBSD on it.

- Brightness control doesn't work right
- No power management
- No hot swap support for drives
- onboard ethernet is slow even for 10baseT
- no accelerated Xserver if you can get the Rage Pro to work at all.  
(It wasn't working as of 3.0, the xserver was missing, leaving only  
Xmacppc 8 bit 256 color non accelerated video)
- No sleep or standby support
- Cardbus slots don't work (PCMCIA does last time I tried)
- No support for Rage Pro LT in machfb, so no accelerated console,  
color support, or virtual terminals
- No sound playback even from an audio cd and driver is unstable
- IDE controller is slow
- SCSI controller driver is unstable
- No PMU support so you can close the lid and the cpu is still  
running full speed and it will damage the screen if left that way.