On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 12:45:18AM -0800, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
> On Mar 10, 2007, at 4:28 AM, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> 
> >what I yet didn't get from this list about NetBSD on the Mac mini  
> >is: Is power management and fan control supported?
> 
> Power management is going to be minimal, at best.  That's the state of  
> NetBSD's ACPI power management right now.
> 
> >, and: After having installed via BootCamp, is BootCamp still  
> >necessary in order to get NetBSD running?
> 
> Yes.  NetBSD does not support EFI on x86 yet, so you will continue to  
> need BootCamp.

Again, no.  The latest EFI firmware for the Mini will launch a traditional
PC BIOS and boot from an MBR partition if it sees no GPT partition table
on the disk.  But you must have the latest firmware.

Also, the VGA BIOS included in this BIOS is an unmodified Intel OEM VGA
BIOS with a fairly nasty bug: it will hang trying to probe monitor DDC
capabilities if no monitor is present, so you can't boot headless.  The
solution is to get out your soldering iron and make a little VGA loopback
widget that ties the DDC sense line to ground througha 75-ohm resistor.

I have five minis at my house.  Three run OS X, one runs FreeBSD 6, and
one runs NetBSD.  None ever seem to get particularly hot and the fans
aren't loud, so the lack of power management is no real problem for me.