Michael> Any comments on these notebooks with NetBSD?  I booted
    Michael> 1.4 on CD on a colleague's and it saw the important
    Michael> devices (network, disk, cdrom), but I don't know about
    Michael> Xfree86. It seems to have a WinModem, which is a pain,
    Michael> but it still has two slots. 1.4 doesn't have Cardbus
    Michael> support, so it didn't see that support, and we didn't
    Michael> know how to make it boot from floppy.

My employer has loaned one (Armada 1700) to me; they gave it to me
with Windows 2000 Evaluation Edition (?) installed, some Xircom 10/100
ethernet PCMCIA card or other, and a dongle which didn't fit it!  I
had a 1.4.1 boot disk in there so fast it'd make your eyes spin!
Getting the rest of the distribution onto the machine was a bit
tricky, because I have no access to CDs bearing NetBSD, and the LAN
was a no-go (because 1.4.1/INSTALL has no Xircom driver and the dongle
didn't fit anyway).  A serial cable, /sbin/slattach, and about 6 hours
later, I had a working 1.4.1 binary distribution.  I've yet to find
the time to put anything more recent on it (source, Xircom, etc.).

My comments...

It's damned heavy.

I've gotten only a couple of hours out of the battery, but then again,
I don't know what condition it was in when I got it, I haven't yet it,
and I run it off mains most of the time anyway.

My thinking is, like yours, that it must have a winmodem (which pisses
me off just a bit, but I'm not really too fazed).

Now I remember: I booted off 1.4.2 boot floppies (1.44MB x 2), but it
took me a while to realise that the disk bearing boot1.fs was broken
quite near the end of the disk, and so, as boot2.fs is so much
smaller, I merely swapped which floopy received which of boot[12].fs,
and went on to get the 1.4.1 distribution from a handy serial-capable
source.

XFree86 works a treat 1024x768x16, and the touchpad is cute, if only
slightly awkward.  With a bit of experimenting, I determined I needed
"Protocol MouseSystems" and "Device /dev/pms0".

Without APM stuff available in 1.4.1/GENERIC (and no source yet to do
anything about it), it tends to *sleep* after only a few minutes of
idle time (which is ever so slightly annoyingly too frequently).  It
wakes again with little problem, but I have noticed a few console
messages reporting the occasional lost interrupt upon *waking*.



    Michael> I know that I want NetBSD on it... I may want MS-Project
    Michael> as well, which I'd get via VMware under Linux, but I'd
    Michael> rather avoid the Linux at all, since everything other
    Michael> than VMware can run under Linux emulation. Unless someone
    Michael> has a good suggestion for a project tracking software
    Michael> that includes a PERT chart and works on NetBSD or under
    Michael> WINE.

Pass.

--
Kevin.