On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, NetBSD Bob wrote:

>                 One feature I like about NetBSD, over the rest, is
> the retention of the simple install scripts.   They be comfy, like
> 4.3BSD on my old IBM RISC box.  I like the KISS approach, when it
> comes to installing.  The fewer frills and guis, the better IMHO.
> 
	Quite a few NetBSD ports have moved across to sysinst, which
	I find quite good. I'd be unhappy if we ever lost the ability
	to take the tarfiles and install by hand, but I have found
	sysinst easier to use for many people.

> If there is any feature from OpenBSD that one might beg for, it
> is that easybooting abilility.  Whatever they are doing in the
> boot code, is just enough better that it works all the time.
	
	Is this from floppies?

> Once the machines are up, they are not that much different.
> OpenBSD is using FreeBSD's ports scheme, which is a little
> better than NetBSD's IMHO, but, other than that, I don't
> sense enough feature difference to worry about.

	NetBSD's pkgsrc was taken from FreeBSD's ports and has had
	quite a few enhancements - I thought we kept up to date
	featurewise - have you noticed anything we're missing?

> 					   The sun3 port
> is now running GREAT on my old 3/260 crate.... finally.
> If I could just do the same for the 4/260 crate.  The IPX
> is now happy.... finally, and also, if I could just do that
> for the SS1....etc.
> 
	My guess is disk configuration/disklabel, but I'd still
	like to see a fix rather than a workaround.

> My goal with the SS1 is to have it replace a lowend 486/33 FBSD
> web server, plus become a local cvs repository so I can roll
> my own daily current tarballs to feed the VAXen, MIPsen, Alphas,
> Sun3's and Sun4's at home.   It should handle that easily.
> Or, maybe bring in a VAX.  Nah, tha Boss would give me some
> strange looks with a loose VAX running around the office.
> The SS1 with a 19 inch monitor is close enough to looking
> like a worstation, that it should pass muster, serving
> its Web, and then doing my unixy things in the background.
> Alternatively, I could load up a stack of boxes on the IPX,
> and use that instead.  It is a little faster.  But, the
> difference i speed is not all that important to my needs.
> 
	The SS1 is certainly no speed daemon :), but it should be able
	to carry that off without problem. Just don't be in a hurry when
	you compile anything on it :)

> Other than that, I am tending to say NetBSD is the way to go,
> on most all of my toyz.
> 
	Lets hope it can be all the toyz one day :)

> Sorry for the bandwidth, but I felt like dumping a little,
> somewhere other than /dev/null.

	Hey, if you can't talk about your experiences with NetBSD on
	sparcs and others on port-sparc, where can you? :)

		David/absolute