Amen.  I still prefer NetBSD over the others (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc) 
but it's certainly not as light as it used to be.  It's a little 
piggish lately for daily use on my VS3100 m30 so I've reverted to 
Ultrix as 4.3BSD won't run on these machines.  I wish I had some Y2K 
patches for Ultrix 4.4 though, support for larger disk partitions would 
be nice as well.

NetBSD 1.4L was fairly zippy on this machine though and I might go back 
to running it but NetBSD 2.1 was a dog and dig an awful lot of disk 
thrashing, haven't tried 3 yet though.

I kinda miss the days of NetBSD 1.2 on my Mac II CI.  1.2 was really 
lightweight, didn't support the VS3100 though.

I'm not B!tc*ing, I'm sure NetBSD 3 runs quite well on the faster, 
beefier vax machines with more than 32MB of RAM.

--Kevin D. Ogden


On Feb 26, 2006, at 12:36 AM, Chuck McManis wrote:

> I've not completely vanished either. My "House of VAX" pages still get 
> hit pretty regularly on my web site. Generally I've become a bit 
> disappointed in NetBSD in general (perhaps in all of the *BSDs) in 
> that the lean/mean operating system that had just as much as you 
> needed but not too much seems to have been lost in a world where a PC 
> with 256MB of main memory is considered practically an embedded 
> system. The VAX has always represented for me the ultimate CISC 
> machine, something that ran a multi-user operating system in less 
> bytes than any thing else. I love having 32 terminals hooked up to a 
> MicroVAX II and it isn't really even breaking a sweat.
>
> That isn't NetBSD's charter, I understand that. Maybe 4.3 Tahoe is the 
> best thing you can run on the machine these days.
>
> --Chuck
>
>