Hello,

> > Yes and yes, but graphics can be a bit of a pain to set up.
> 
> Aha.  I guess it'll depend on the size of the screen, right? 
No.

> Graphics card?  (I'd thought all models could be similar, but I was wrong...)
More like PCish assumptions in XFree86.

> I just saw a recent post in the archives from a guy saying he got it
> working on a 14" model.
Well, at least the Radeon models should be fine with some fiddlong ( just one additional option in XF86Config )
No idea about the Rage 128 though, but in theory it should work just as well.

> Well, I wouldn't do much multimedia stuff on it aside playing some music
> and eventually some videos (hence, maybe buying an iBook is not such a
> good idea).  I would basically use it to have a machine to carry around
> and do some work (writing, programming, etc.) while away from home (so
> NetBSD could be enough provided that it supports graphics and networking
> correctly).
NetBSD doesn't support much power management on this hardware, at least on G4 iBooks the CPU sleep mode doesn't work so they don't cool down when idle, but yours is a G3 so things should be different ( sleep mode certainly works on my G3-equipped S900 )
To compensate this a little I wrote drivers for some fan controllers so you can change temperature thresholds to keep it cool but Apple used quite a lot of different ones so YMMV.

have fun
Michael