On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Jason R Thorpe wrote:

> Go ahead and build KDE/GNOME!  It *should* build just fine (but, those
> are pretty bloatest desktop environments -- might make your R3000
> feel even *slower* :-)

Last time I tried to build KDE 2 I ran into a ton of problems - has anyone
successfully built these packages on netbsd/pmax? KDE 1 is actually quite
usable, but I don't know how much slower KDE 2 would be...

> The current Mozilla just needs some minor tweaking to work on MIPS
> (some machine-dependent threads stuff for the internal threads
> package it has).

It would be nice to have a modern web browser! Of course,
Mozilla/Netscape6 is slow on my Powerbook, so I don't think it will be
screaming on the pmax...

> I have built plenty of packages on NetBSD/mips (not necessarily pmax).
> And I have certainly built many packages on non-x86 systems on NetBSD.

It is possible that the other mips ports have better package support.
Have tried building kde, (any web browser of your choice, e.g. current
versions of konqueror or even amaya,) kaffe, or xemacs on netbsd/pmax?
It's not unusual to want a desktop environment, web browser, java and an
editor, but it's hard to get them to work on netbsd/pmax. This is not to
discount the hard work that people have done on netbsd and the packages,
just to point out that it's not an out-of-the-box compile at all for these
packages...

I have realized that netbsd/pmax is a do-it-yourself proposition: I built
my own versions of amaya, kaffe and xemacs (kaffe doesn't work, but maybe
I'll debug the runtime someday.) I got Stanford's versions of Kerberos 4
and Zephyr to work, and maybe one day I will get arla/afs to work, if I
can figure out what's wrong with kernel modules on netbsd/pmax...