Okay, I'll bite.

On 2004/03/08, at 1:44, Charles The Hawk wrote:

> I help with an orphanage in Zambia which was recently
> given several old Mac IIci's and a Quadra 950.  We
> would like to use them to teach the orphans basic
> computing skills.

How old are these orphans? And what do you mean by "basic"?

netBSD may not be appropriate. Mac OS 7 probably is okay, really.

You might want to browse this list a bit to get some idea of the sort 
of problems your students would be trying to solve on netBSD, to see if 
needs match.

>  For security reasons, all the
> IIci's had the hard drives erased, so we've been
> installing the O/S on them.

Pretty straightforward, isn't it? Especially when compared to, say, 
pre-1996 MSWxx. ;-) Hey, installing the Mac OS could actually be a good 
assignment for some of your beginners, don't you think?

>   I'd really prefer to
> teach them using something not so proprietary,

Well, I don't particularly consider the old Mac OS any more proprietary 
than the usual option. It's a lot easier to use at the beginner's 
level, too.

>  (not
> to mention the fact that i know nothing about Macs)

That really isn't anything to worry about.

> so would like to install NetBSD on them, however, i'm
> not getting very far.
>
> I have gone over the checklist and everything appears
> to be correct.  However, when i run the Booter, i
> get the message "Bye-bye [blah, blah]" and the machine
> freezes.  Heh, it certainly *shouldn't* be done like
> that.
>
> That was using the SysInst method.  I then tried the
> traditional method, but the Mac disk utilities i use
> in Linux complained about every one of the mkfs files
> that i downloaded and wouldn't write them to the
> floppy.

Which Linux are you using, and which utilities? And, incidentally, 
there's supposedly a useable Mac68k Debian build. Looking at that may 
help.

> I'm booting the Mac with no extensions, virtual memory
> disabled, 32 bit memory on, video set to 1-bit.  Any
> ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

How big are your disks? (I suggest > 300MB.) How much RAM in the 
machines? (I suggest > 16MB.) If you don't have FPUs, are you using the 
marvelous soft floating point builds that have been getting so much 
attention on the list lately? (I really want to get back home to try 
them.)

(Others on the list might want to chime in to rehash what it takes to 
get netBSD loaded with less than my recommendations? Or you could check 
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com or one of the other places that archives 
the list.)

> Perhaps i should just give up the idea and try to find
> a good typing tutor or something what will run under
> MacOS?

A GUI text editor and some other sundry tools are included in the 
system install disks. You can download Macintosh Programmers Workbench 
(CLI, assembler/compiler) and various debuggers from Apple for free. 
(Mac OS 7.5 can also be downloaded for free.) Last I looked, MacPerl 
was still available. You might want to ask the people who unloaded the 
old Macs on you if they'd be willing to unload a copy of ClarisWorks 
(word processing, spreadsheet, simple drawing) your direction as well. 
With a little determination, you might get MRJ to run some simple Java 
Applets for you. Plenty of other stuff still floating around, too.

I think I'd probably use the Mac OS for the beginning and non-technical 
stuff, reserve netBSD for the kids who want to learn the technical side 
of things.

Just my opinion.