Hello,

> I've no doubt that the onboard ethernet works fine, I'm just thinking
> that a little more network speed, via a 100Mb NIC, would make the 7200
> a little more viable as an X term.  I have 32MB of RAM in the 7200
> right now, but I could easily double or quadruple that amount to 64 or
> 128MB respectively.
> Maxing out the VRAM should give me some good color at decent
> resolutions, and a scant one or two gigabyte hard drive should be more
> than sufficient for a decent X install.

Did you check if the onboard video chip is even supported by any Xserver
we have? If it works as console you can use Xmacppc but that's limited
to the resolution/colour depth something else, usually the firmware,
sets up and it doesn't support any kind of acceleration.
 
If it's some ATI chip chances are it will work ( but don't hold your
breath, Apple did some fairly weird things in early PowerMacs ), if it's
some weird Apple chip you better find documentation and someone with the
right combination of hardware, knowledge and time since XFree86 doesn't
support any of these things.
If the chip is unsupported you can still get a PCI graphics board, any
PCI Mach64, Rage whatever, Radeon, Voodoo3 and probably others should
work ( at least in -current) provided they have:
- OpenFirmware ROMs
- support OpenFirmware text mode ( the firmware images provided by
Matrox don't, although at least for the Millennium I there /is/ a
version that works. )
- firmware that's compatible with OF 1.0.5 - some newer Radeon releases
are known to cause problems here, downgrading to something older helped.

have fun
Michael