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Re: does someone have a working Beige G3 rev. a



Well, I guess the question should have been does anyone have a working
Beige G3 rev. a (hardware and with NetBSD) that they would like to sell?

To tell you the truth, I've never even bothered trying to get NetBSD running on a beige G3 because of how idiosyncratic it is. Also, I wouldn't want to have to ever re-figure out how to get it to boot in a datacenter should something happen like the PRAM get zapped.

I could help you out with a PowerMac 7600-type machine. Bootable PCI IDE cards for Macs are pretty easy to find, and although they don't support larger than 128 gigs in MacOS, they support any size in NetBSD, plus most can use up to four drives.

A 7600 can take up to 1 gig of memory, plus accelerators are cheap. I have several G3 accelerators which have 1 meg of full CPU speed L2 cache which run at 500 MHz. Once I have time to figure out how to set the frequency ratios at boot, they can run at up to 1 GHz.

Another CPU option is a 1 GHz G4 with 256k of L2 and 2 megs of L3. They cost $100 new. This is what I have in andromeda, and it's completely stable.

To summarize:

PowerMac 7600
IDE drive
1 gig of memory
Accelerator
ethernet card
IDE card

At least it'll boot easily and predictably.

John


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