I managed to resurrect my old PowerBase 180, and I'd like to run NetBSD on it. 
I am not a complete newbie, having run NetBSD on mac68k and i386 at times in 
the past. Nonetheless, I do have some hardware-related questions.

This machine does not have a working floppy (funny thing - I have two broken
Sony/Apple "Superdrives" but the 800K floppy in my ancient Mac Plus still 
works) nor a working SCSI CDROM.  I do have an ATAPI CDROM drive that works 
fine on the PB (I got it to boot a MacOS 7.6 CD and install that onto an 
antique SCSI drive so I could run BootVars and get into OF). I am somewhat 
familiar with OF, having run Linux/PPC on this box for several years in the 
1990s.

I am in the process of downloading the NetBSD/macppc ISO. I am hoping that
OF can boot from that, from a CDROM drive as master on the sole IDE channel.
I do recall that Linux/PPC had no problem using the master and the slave on 
that bus ca. 1999 (unlike MacOS 7.x), so I'm hoping that once NetBSD boots, I 
can install from a CDROM master to an IDE HD slave. Will this be a problem? I 
can install onto the ancient SCSI drive, although at 120MB, it may not hold 
the entire distribution (although X is very optional for this machine!) and 
then copy that over to the IDE drive, although I'm concerned that the IDE 
drive would then not be bootable, as I understand that NetBSD (like Linux) 
needs a multi-stage bootloader on OF 2.x machines, which I assume is 
installed by sysinst running from the CD.

I'd also like to get Ethernet going as cheaply as possible. I have several DEC 
Tulip-compatible cards for the PC. Is there any chance they would work with 
NetBSD on PowerPC despite the obvious firmware inconsistency? ;)