I am not an expert on the different flavors of Netfinity boxes, but the two I have seen are the Netfinity 4000 and the ones I set up were slightly different. They came with a CDROM and a single 1.4-meg floppy. They had 1 gig of RAM and an 8-gig hard drive plus an empty bay for another drive if one so desires. One thing about the Netfinities is they are definitely designed for server farms and other similar installations. They are what are commonly called pizza boxes in that they are only about 2 inches thick so a lot of them can fit in to a rack. The serial port on the back is also used for a special management module that runs all the time even when the power to the P.C. is supposedly turned off. The management module spits out occasional garbage characters so you see funny things on your screen when you hook up your access device. It isn't a lot of garbage, but every few seconds a stray punctuation mark will appear. When you start the FreeBSD serial console, however, the management module goes to sleep and you get a serial session with no trouble. IBM only supports SUSE Linux on their Netfinity boxes, but they were very nice to us and shared what information about FreeBSD they did have. Your development environment is the familiar gcc family of tools so if you need to program in C, have at it. I found that the newer distribution of gcc didn't like some of my old programming routines, but the changes needed to fix them were rather minor. I think you can get Netfinity systems with no operating system so you start from scratch. I simply did the whole formatting routine so if there was any Windows stuff on there to start with, it is long gone now. Martin Brent Harding writes: >Wow, what do Netfinity systems come with already on? I heard on redhat.com >that that distribution would work. The next box I get, I'll be probably >installing serial style until ethernet is going anyways. I just was >thinking what the least waste of money would be in doing this, having a >bunch of extra software, and features I don't need in most systems places >offer, or if anything preloaded with linux is a good deal.