Hello--

I traded my PowerMac 5400 to a friend for her Performa 550 so I could 
run NetBSD without the agony of the Open Firmware boot. (Apparently 
somebody can make that work, but it's beyond me.) Anyway, I have to 
congratulate you guys on how well the Booter app works! That has got to 
be one of the most painless installs of NetBSD I've ever experienced...

I'm planning on running Apache on this little box. Everything seems to 
be going pretty well so far, so I've only got one question, of personal 
curiosity: How does NetBSD run so fast on such an old machine? I used 
to run NetBSD-i386 (v. 1.5.2) at the office on an old 486/33 box, and 
it was pig-slow, taking 10-15 minutes just to boot. It took a solid 24 
hours just to compile Samba! (We replaced that computer with a Beige 
G3--I got lazy and installed Jaguar on it.) This little Mac has the 
same clock speed, and only 12 MB of RAM, but I'm to the login prompt in 
less than two minutes! My friend told me she had it upgraded, but she 
can't remember the particulars. LowEndMac tells of a Sonnet upgrade 
that changed the 68030 processor to a 68040, but at the same clock 
speed. Is the Motorola processor that much better than the Intel? (No, 
I'm not trolling, it's just a pretty remarkable difference to me.) The 
Performa, by the way, is running MacBSD v. 1.5.2.

Any thoughts on the ultimate NetBSD-Mac68K machine?

Gary Montcalm