On Fri, 4 May 2001 mgraffam@idsi.net wrote:

> I have a Mac LCII w/ 10M of RAM, and Asante Ethernet card. I'm thinking of
> installing a second 360M HD to put NetBSD on, and an FPU.
>
> Will NetBSD be able to support the ethernet card and FPU?

I believe so. To be sure, you can drop an install (ramdisk) kernel
into the folder with the latest Booter, set the Booter to "boot from
file", enter the name, boot, and try to configure the network (with
the sysinstall menus). You actually need the FPU; it's machines
without the FPU that don't work so well.

These files, in the "arch/mac68k" directory, should be pretty close to
what you'll get with NetBSD-1.5.1 in a month or so...

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/mac68k/installation/misc/Booter1.11.4a3.sea.hqx
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/mac68k/snapshot/20010406-1.5.1_BETA/installation/instkernel/netbsd-INSTALL.gz

The latest formal releases are under .../NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/ and
.../NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.3. If "ftp.netbsd.org" isn't responding, there's
a huge list of mirrors on the main page, <http://www.netbsd.org/>.

> How is X performance on this machine? My main purpose for installing
> NetBSD will be to use this machine as an X terminal. When I'm not
> writing Matlab code on the UNIX machine, the rest of the time it will be
> in MacOS for office/desktop related stuff.

X performance on a LCII with 10mb? How should I put this... by modern
standards, expect it to suck mightily.

> Is NetBSD the answer I'm looking for?

Well, the best part is, you can play around with it, and when a faster
machine comes your way, you can leverage your experience with NetBSD
to get set up much quicker, as it's all the same OS, whether it's
running on mac68k, i386, powerpc, &c.


Frederick