I've just found my way here, have MacBSD up and running, and am looking
forward to putting it to good use.  I feel I should say 'hello'.

First point: I must express my thanks to and praise of those who have
worked on the MacBSD project and its predecessors.  It really is a super
job.  I bought my IIvi on the day Apple brought it out, expecting to
run A/UX on it, as an '030-based machine.  But until now, no luck. At
long last, I can run it using the OS God and Dennis Ritchie intended.

Excepting the well-publicised installer out-of-memory problem, plus a
slightly more interesting difficulty reported below, installation was
totally straightforward, X came up first time, and I even succeeded in
getting PPP running on a Unix system for the first time ever, after only
a few wrinkles :-/.  Since then, I've been giving the system a good
thrashing with a few hefty compiles, X and PPP all going together, all
without significant problems.  Very solid -- well done, guys!

The minor difficulties I've had reflect discussions in the recent
archives.  I had been aware that Alice had been rechristened MacBSD and
was potentially functional on the IIvi for several months, but my plan
to join your select band had been stymied by the lack of a good backup
system so that I could unload and reformat my hard disk.  The new
Syquest EZ135s and ZIPs have been as rare as hens' teeth here in the UK,
but I succeeded in getting an EZ135 a couple of weeks ago.  Initially,
I tried loading MacBSD onto that, but my experience was much as others
have reported.  I could get to single-user read-only status easily
enough, but any attempt to go through the full boot sequence to multi-
user resulted in a random halt.  I *did* manage to get to multi-user
by stripping out most of /etc/rc, but anything which involved more than
a little I/O to the Syquest caused a bus hang, major filesystem
corruption and a square one reinstallation :-((.  This was with the
distribution 1.1 kernel.  I've since loaded 1.1 to my hard disk, and
updated it to netbsd.GENERIC_52, but the Syquest problem remains.  Any
attempt to do major I/O (say, a gnutar backup of the hard disk root
partition) leads to a bus hang, plus a corrupt filesystem on the Syquest
after reboot.

A question: I had assumed that MacBSD somehow acquired the device driver
from the Mac-side code as part of the boot process, but I see there
is speculation that the Syquest problems are associated with MacBSD's
SCSI driver.  I haven't yet had time to download the source (the piece
of damp string which passes for a transAtlantic connection is another
impediment I have to work around!), so I would appreciate clarification.
Is MacBSD's SCSI driver a ground-up construct or a partial takeover?

A comment offered purely in a constructive sense, and without detracting
from my admiration of the team who have put so much effort in: possibly
the reason the project isn't getting the widespread fame it truly
deserves is the modest documentation that's available.  I suspect that
given just a few more HOW-TOs, and a wider distribution of them, MacBSD
could quickly find itself on the verge of major take-up.  [Yes, I'm
willing to add another stone to the cairn!  Any suggestions?]  I wonder
how much could be 'borrowed' (with appropriate credit, of course!) from
the general NetBSD and Linux HOW-TOs.

On pppd: I've put together a basic 'up' script using the man pages and
one or two hints gleaned from the Linux NET-2 HOWTO.  I've been taking
pppd down rather inelegantly, by prodding it manually with 'kill -INT'.
The list archives contain mention of some example ppp-up and ppp-down
scripts.  I'd appreciate a pointer to them or a copy by email.  Thanks!
I don't suppose there's any chance of dial-on-demand working, is there?

I fear the above is a shade untidy : it's a dump of various thoughts
which have come to me over this weekend's setting-up process.  Please
excuse the rambling.

Apologies, too, for forwarding this from the Mac-side.  I normally use
xemacs as my MUA, but I'm a bit leery of trying to get that running on
this machine -- apart from the lengthy compile, all that rarely-used
lisp code will eat up half the hard disk and keep the poor little CPU
running in circles forever.  So I would appreciate your suggestions for
a small but tidy MUA with the functionality of, say, emacs-vm or zmail,
and which runs well under MacBSD.

Russ

[in Edinburgh, Scotland]