> "support for network application seriously lacking". I'm not sure
> what this means. TCP/IP *comes* from BSD. I can think of a handful
> of ICQ-clients, equally many talk- and IRC-clients etc. as well as
> several networking-games. The IPNAT/IPF address-translations and
> filtering-packages are excellent and are used in many firewalls.
> There are network monitoring & tuning tools, libraries for
> distributed computing and whatnot. The statement lacks any
> supporting arguments in the article -- and I frankly can't think of
> what they'd be.

I can think of one thing: There is no decent graphical web browser
native to NetBSD.  The best bet is Netscape, for which you install
shared libraries from some other Unix and use binary compatibility
to run that Unix's Netscape binary.  This mostly works but 1) the
shared libraries don't come with source and take up space, 2) the
binary compatibility sometimes has quirks.  The other alternative
is Mozilla, but Mozilla is troublesome on any platform.  There are
many other graphical web browsers such as amaya, but amaya renders
many sites oddly and has its own special problems.

> "but on many of the other platforms you have to set it up manually
> to boot from another machine". Which ones would those be? I've only
> tried NetBSD/port-amiga (1.3.1 and onwards), NetBSD/port-sparc (1.5)
> and NetBSD/port-i386 (1.4.1->1.5) and all have supported installation
> from a variety of media. All of them have supported installing NetBSD
> from an other OS running on the machine, or over a network via NFS
> or FTP, or via boot-floppies, or via CD... Are you sure there are
> any architectures which require installation from an other machine?

Let's just make a table from reading the NetBSD 1.5 install instructions.

port		removable media install?	easy sysinst interface?
alpha		yes				yes
amiga		yes				no
arm32		yes				no
arc		?				?
atari		yes				no
cobalt		no				no
hp300		yes				no
hpcmips		yes				yes
i386		yes				yes
mac68k		yes				no
macppc		yes				yes
mvme68k		yes				no
news68k		yes				yes
next68k		yes				no
pc532		yes				yes
pmax		yes				yes
sparc		yes				yes
sparc64		yes				yes
sun3		yes				no
vax		yes				yes

Most of the popular platforms use sysinst, and most of all platforms may
install from removable media.  I do not know whether most machine models
have NetBSD supported hardware to use removable media.  It is likely that
some models require a netboot installation.

This table should be taken with a grain of salt.  Your forwarded mail
mentions sysinst on the amiga, but the NetBSD 1.5 amiga install document
never mentions sysinst.

FreeBSD's installation is slightly more friendly.  One thing I remember
about it is that at one time, you could download a single boot floppy, and
through the menu-based interface dial an isp and install the OS from there.
How nice of them to consider poor folk dependant on modems!

Ben
-- 
Code softly and carry a big debugger.