On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, GDB-B&W-X.3.8 wrote:
On Feb 17, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Jamie Kahn Genet wrote:
Anyone got any advice or personal experience running a *nix OS on 68k Macs in particular, but also PPC Macs? I'd love to hear about your successes, failures, thoughts, etc.
If there's any decent objective FAQ on this subject just direct me to that instead.
TIA, Jamie Kahn Genet
I once tried to run YDL 2.x on my PM7200, but it was so slow it was really not very usable. I run YDL 3.0.1 on my B&W G3 400 Mhz machine and it runs decent there. I never tried any on the 68k machines, but would also be interested in others experiences.
I have quite a bit of experience running UNIX on Macs. On 68k, I recommend either netbsd or debian linux. I personally prefer netbsd, it is more of a traditional UNIX, and I like the whole packages system, but debian's apt-get isn't bad (much better than rpm anyway) and might be easier to understand for someone new to netbsd's package system. One think to note about 68k Macs is that there is little to no support for things like the DMA I/O on the Quadra 900, 950, or AV Macs, and there is very little to no support for anything other than on-board video, and there is no support for 8-bit color or 24-bit color (and limited support for 16-bit color). That makes the best machine to run netbsd on the Quadra 650, with it's 33Mhz 040 and 16-bit at 1024x768 screen and no DMA I/O stuff to worry about. It also supports 128MB of interleaved RAM, which is not bad at all. I also like the fact that as long as you secure the machine with good passwords, the ability of anyone to break into it is much lower than an x86 system since there are few to no 68k unix hackers out there!
On PowerPC, I haven't played around too much, but plan to use debian, again primarily because of apt-get. In fact, soon I'll be installing it on a system I have been piecing together for a few years. It's an 8600 motherboard in a 7300 case with a dual 180Mhz 604e CPU card, 1MB L2 cache, 1GB RAM, 100Base-T ethernet, 802.11g wireless, UW SCSI and two 50GB Seagate 7200RPM SCSI drives. With linux on ppc (vs netbsd or openbsd) I'll have the added benefit of being able to run Mac-On-Linux, a hardware abstraction layer, and then run OS 8, 9, or X alongside linux on the same machine, in a window (and then even do remote display by exporting the X11 windows). There's also some driver support in linux for the video in that the 8600 has, if I ever want to use that. Should be interesting.
- Nate
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