In port-newsmips:

 >  I have a NWS-3250, complete with dead lithim battery, that still runs
 >  # uname -a
 > sony sony 4.0 5.0.1 NEWS3200 mips.r3000
 > 
 >  Ive been attempting in vain to get the gnu tools a foothold on it
 > what i wouldnt give to have a decent shell like bash does anyone
 > have a working gcc compiler and other such nicities running ?

Would NEWSOS-4.2R patches for gcc, perl5, sendmail, xv, and netpbm be
useful to you?

 > .. as much as i can discern, port-newsmips is not yet self hosting,
 > and must be started / launched from newsos

Not the case for the "stable" newsmips ports at least.  When first
booting NetBSD there's hackery needed with the Boot Monitor to tell
the EEPROM about the changed boot device and kernel file.

 > If someone has an a.out bash binary or a working gnu make/gcc that
 > would allow me to build my own as well as the other gnu tools, I am
 > looking for you.

D'oh.  I deleted them last night. :/

-- 
Chris Baird,, <cjb@brushtail.apana.org.au>