Michael Wolfson <mw@costello.cnf.cornell.edu> writes:

> > But before purchasing, I was wondering what kind of problems I would run
> > into.  Is there an iBook howto or anything?  Is any of the iBook hardware
> > not supported yet?  ANything would be helpful.
> 
> No special iBook HOWTO, since it is not significantly different to install
> or run NetBSD.

... but I'm writing such a page anyway, just because it's good for
publicity. web.mit.edu/nathanw/www/ibook.html is where it will be. I'm
lazy, though, so I'm not going to make it terribly pretty, just informative.

>  The only caveats are to use 1.5.1 or a somewhat recent
> -current kernel, as the built-in keyboard wasn't supported before.

Correct.

> If you use a -current kernel, then there is Airport support, but it
> hasn't been widely tested.

Well, I've been using it as my main network interface to the world for
a week now, and it works fine, including building all of userland
multiple times over NFS.

> AFAIK, the internal modem isn't supported.

Correct, though somewhat mysterious.

> Don't press the fn-PgUp key combo, it is the same keystroke as the
> 'eject PCMCIA' button on the PowerBook 2400.

Fixed properly couple of days ago in rev 1.16 of macppc/dev/akbd.c,
thanks to Tsubai.

>  You might want to run XFree86 instead of Xmacppc.

16-bit color is nicer than 8-bit color, but it's a bit more work to
get started. Xmacppc had the benefit of Just Working.

Sound isn't yet supported. I have some leads on the requisite
information, so I hope to be working on it soon...

Also, there's no support for power management: no way to query the
battery level from software (but there is an external level-check
button on the battery, fortunately), no way to sleep/suspend the
system, and it gets much warmer running NetBSD than it does running
either MacOS 9.1 or X.

        - Nathan