Re: So...a whole new computer?
I'm going to be porting a couple of packages, it's good to have a non x86 platform to test on. I also have a few PowerPC boxes I could use. I have two O2s, each cost me the princely sum of a tenner each from a reseller of ex corporate/educational kit and were from Salford University (probably their VR suite).
I'll have to see how it works - last time I looked Linux was probably the most functional, although porting software to it was interesting (autoconf generally goes 'what the fuck is this?').. NetBSD had a nicely accelerated X, OpenBSD not so much. Both BSDs suffer from the substandard PS/2 hardware in the O2s, I'm getting horrific key repeat to the point it's unusable from a glass terminal. Going to stick in a PCI USB card and use that instead..
I don't expect to run anything modern on it - I tried running OpenBSD on a pentium II 300 (retro gaming box), and it was incapable of running X and Wireshark without dropping packets, tcpdump was fine though.
The second O2 I'm using as a proper O2 and running Irix, it doesn't get used too much (and also suffers because there's no effective free compiler toolchain available for Irix)