Hello everyone,

I have a question about the ports collection etc.

I am looking for a *nix (bsd, linux) to run no my machines, 
on ppc and ix86 hardware both as server and workstations.

I was wondering how the ports worked, and is there variation between the
different platforms and how I must use the ports for each.  I have been
doing a lot of reading on this subject and am I right in believing that
with netbsd the setup is done so that the ports collection will compile
for each platform as is?

I was noticing that in the linux side of things there had to be
differences between the different packages for different platforms even
if they were using a source system, but with netbsd the drivers and
system has been setup in such a way that if you have a driver for one
piece of hardware, the platform it is running on is irrelevant.

Thanks for any help with this, and another question that is genuine
curiosity.....

In my wanderings I have been reading about different types of OSes and
kernels etc. With the emphasis on portability of netbsd, would it not
make sense to use a micro or exo kernel?  I know very little about these
things, but from what I have read it seems to make things like security,
and portability much easier.  I have not had a chance to hear from
people that actually do implementations (except for Mr. Tanenbaum in his
articles), so would love to hear more about this.

Thanks in advance for your advice and opinions.

Rohan