Regarding the installation of NetBSD, from the point of view of someone who,
while never having installed OpenBSD or FreeBSD, has installed HP-UCK,
Solamis, Sol8is, Irix, AIX, Mandrake Linux, DeadRat Linux and Little
Debian's Snack Linux, I must say that NetBSD's, thus far, has been the most
sensible and least convolved.

I understand we're thinking of pkgizing everything.  While I think that
pkgs are cool, and as much as I had been gung-ho-fat-boy about it for
so long, to go to the granularity represented by Lunix is just nuts.

Every time I've done a Linux install of any sort, I've wondered, "Hey,
where'd nfsd, and finger, and the automounter, and ypbind, and ftp,
and nslookup(!) go?".

I could see us splitting out some of the networking stuff maybe, but
under NetBSD as it stands, nfsd and nslookup, for example, are part
of the base installation.  No guesswork, no digging around for what have
been regarded as "common base system utilities"!  It's just there, and it
works.

Beware the overly granular approach, please.  If I want linux, there are
eleventeen million distributions from which to choose, some of which will
actually run on my SPARCstation.

I'd prefer to be running NetBSD in its elegant, well-coded and well-laid-out
form as it stands.

If text installers or install documents scare you, you will probably not get
your system installed in any functional manner, and you will have to settle
for a less functional OS.  Conquer your fear of the technical, and you will
have a system that cannot be rivaled by anything with a rilly kool
installer.

Right now, I live in a UNIXophobic household:  My daughter runs MacOS.  My
wife would prefer to live in a Windows environment (and does sometimes).
My SS5, running NetBSD, can serve up NFS, AppleShare and Samba (nmb/smb
for Windows File Sharing).  Everyone is happy.

And NetBSD 1.5-Q is amazingly stable.  The problem of unmounting async
ffs filesystems may still be there, I don't know ('cause I switched to
softdeps).
				--*greywolf;
--
"Windows/NT - From the people who brought you EDLIN".