> Date: Fri, 30 Aug 96 15:30:23 +0100
> From: "Justin Stringfellow" <string@ncp.gpt.co.uk>
> 
> In the absence of the information being easily available from the web site
> (I'm at work... not supposed to be useing ng it) can anyone answer a few basic 
> questions?
> 1. How 'big' is riscbsd (in terms of Mb to be downloaded)?

It depends on the sets you download. But for a decent selection
of sets without X, I have found it to be around 50 MB.

> 2. What state is it in now (the web page doesn't seem to have been updated
> recently)?

I would say that it is in a pretty stable stage, but there has not
been much optimization on the drivers.

> 3. how much room does it realistically take up on hard disk? the web page 
> states 400mb - but I shan't use emacs rather than vi, and I don't want a 
> c++ compiler - I'm sure there must be other parts that won't be useful.

I am using less than 200 MB with the full comp set.

But, I am not running X at the moment.

> 4. can anyone make any helpful suggestions about a h/d & controller to 
> buy ? I have a risc pc with an arm610 and a 420Mb h/d along with 12mb
> RAM + 2Mb vram. I want to keep the RISCOS side of things, and so was 
> planning on buying the yellowstone rapide controller and a quantum fireball
> ...until I read the reccomendations in the FAQ here.

It is very hard to tell what will happen on the driver side. At present
the best is to use an ADFS IDE drive, but there are SCSI drivers
for the Cumana SCSI-2, PowerTec and Acorn cards. The problem is that
these drivers are not optimized and are very slow.

Kjetil B.