Dom,

The 880's a sweet machine. I look forward to getting one as soon as I can.
From my experience with the MP770 I know that they only limitations in using
a CF card as a boot drive is in preparing it for use. I use a 2GB solidstate
SanDisk CF card as primary drive and I have it partitioned 10MB FAT and
1900MB+ NetBSD. I had to set up the partitioning in Linux, though, as
Windows won't allow you to manage partitions on what it terms "removable
media".

Of course, that's accurate, but its annoying :) Of note, I'd stick with
solidstate over Microdrives. Sollidstate is a tad slower (but fast enough
for you not to notice) but consumes a great deal less power. I doubt you're
going to find much in the way of speed with these older machines, but they
are operational speedy.

HTH!

> I'm in the process of buying a MobilePro 880 to run NetBSD 3 on. Does
> anyone know what the write speed of the CFII slot is? I intend to boot
> from a microdrive and I'd like to buy one that is as fast as possible.
> 
> On the same subject, are there any upper limits on the size of disc I
> can use in the 880? I see you can buy quite large (4/8GB) CFII cards
> now, but I am wary that the capacity could be restricted. Hopefully
> not.
> 
> Thanks,
> dom
>