Best Unix for old 68k and PPC Macs?

On 2/21/2005 10:44, "Paul Schinder" <schinderpobox.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> Nothing on 68k's, but I've run Yellow Dog Linux
> <http://www.yellowdoglinux.com> with great success on a variety of
> PPC's. I've currently got it running on an original iBook and a beige
> G3, and in the past ran it for years on a Performa 6400. I don't know
> whether the current version of YDL (4.0.1) will run on so-called Old
> World Macs (roughly, beige G3 and before, ROM on a chip) because the
> boot process on those machines requires at least a minimal version of
> Classic Mac OS to boot first. But it works just fine on New World,
> which can boot directly into Linux.

I have a now-oldish version of Yellow Dog Linux running on my 7300. I
believe that's about as far back as it will go (although 7200 MIGHT work...I
never had one so I don't remember).

Yellow Dog isn't limited to older Macs...they got their temperature control
(fan control) working for the G5 machines in a release a couple of weeks
ago. That release also runs on the Mac Mini according to reports (I don't
have one of those, either).

  --john

Nigel Stanger <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
[snip]
> The nice thing about BSD is that Darwin is also a BSD derivative, so you
> can transfer some BSD knowledge to/from Mac OS X. The only reason I
> switched to Debian was that it had better package management tools (which
> may no longer be true).
>
> <http://www.netbsd.org/>

It certainly would be an advantage to be able to transfer some of my OS X CL knowledge to whichever UNIX OS I end up with. How similar are various BSD OS's to Darwin/Mac OS X?

Regards,
 Jamie Kahn Genet

Bill West <billwestappleisp.net> wrote:

> Jamie, what distros are you familiar with?

I've used several Linux distributions, but mostly with common programs
in X Windows - nothing down and dirty.

I'm most familiar with Mac OS X Unix, having had to finally dive into the
CL once 8.6 and 9.x became impossibly obsolete for certain work (not to
say I don't still use 8.6 - about the best classic Mac OS around for Macs
old enough to run it, but too old to run System 7 IMHO).

> As a rank Linux newbie --Lindspire works amazingly well for me. Knoppix
> and Xandros ought to match that. But I bought it pre-installed. Support
> sent me a new 56K modem and everything. Another Debian "run-from-CD" works
> on my ancient very tiny PC kit. Guru Eric D. likes free Ubuntu a lot.

Spending any serious money is likely out of the question here. The only
reason I can make these old 68k and early PPC Macs a viable choice is to
use free software. Almost all of my budget has already gone on larger
HDs, more RAM, etc. But I didn't think that would be a problem as I've a
nice fast net connection (so downloading 100's of MBs or more of install
images will be a breeze) and Unix - the OS at most of the important
tools, I hope - are open source. At the most I can probably afford to
license a few shareware programs, and that'll be it. I'd have liked more
cash for software, but oh well...

> I wish I could get installed --everything hooked up --with a tiny
> No-GUI Peanuts Linux, Puppy Linux, Slackware. Just for simple black and
> white pine, mutt, vi, lynx. Well, maybe an X window, GUI and gimp for
> images.
>
> By far the best open source for me is Mac OSX Unix. It has given me
> everything. And OSX to boot.

Oh, I like Panther a great deal. It's stability makes it a winner on
modern Macs for me. Even my old tray-loading Bondi Blue and fruit
coloured iMacs will run 10.3.8 smoothly if given enough RAM.

Pity I can't get Darwin running on a IIci, ey? :-)

Regards,
 Jamie Kahn Genet

On 22-02-2005 15:15:24, Brian McNett wrote:

>For 68K Macs I've seen good results with NetBSD. It's particularly good
>on SE/30s The caveat is that you need at least a 68030 processor, so
>any dreams of running 'nix on an old Mac Classic are straight out.

Right. And I think that goes for any Unix: Unix needs memory management features that
simply weren't available in the 68000.

For an 68000, your only choice is Tenon's MachTen, which is a Unix environment that runs
inside a single Mac application:
<http://www.tenon.com/products/machten/>
<http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/machten-faq/>

Harro de Jong

At 06:15 -0800 2/22/05, Paul Schinder opined:
>ksahr wrote:
>>For years I dual-booted MkLinux and OS 8/9 on my 7100/80AV. Though
>>MkLinux ( http://www.mklinux.org/ ) never got beyond "Pre-R1", I never
>>had any problems with it. I understand that LinuxPPC is generally
>>preferred, but I couldn't run that as it requires a PCI Mac.
>
>LinuxPPC died years ago. Currently, in addition to Yellow Dog, SUSE has
>a PPC distribution and so does Debian, and a quick look at debian.org's
>download pages shows a 68k distro as well. I'm not sure if any of the
>newer distributions (Gentoo, Ubuntu) have PPC distros. Yellow Dog is
>based on Fedora Core, so should look familiar to any Red Hat user.
>
>--
>Paul Schinder
>schinderpobox.com

Yellow Dog Linux will indeed run on 7200's. I have a closet full of
them (six at the moment, with two more in reserve). Version 3 is the
last version to support Old World ROMs, 4.0+ is New World only.
Performance as a server on a 7200/120 is actually quite good, even
running intensive Perl scripts such as Webmin. I have never tried
running X or KDE or Gnome on any of them.

Gentoo has a distro that runs well on New World Macs. I have seen
reports that it can be built on Old World machines; I once spent
about two hours trying without much success.

It is well-nigh impossible to port Unix to the 68000. That processor
has no hardware memory protection, so even a successful port would be
unstable. It takes at least a 68010 for Unix to make much sense.

--Ron
--
Ron Risley
www.risley.net

On Feb 22, 2005, at 9:15 AM, Paul Schinder wrote:
> a PPC distribution and so does Debian, and a quick look at debian.org's
> download pages shows a 68k distro as well. I'm not sure if any of the
> newer distributions (Gentoo, Ubuntu) have PPC distros.

Ubuntu is available for the Mac. I have it installed on my desktop G4
as a dual-boot OS.

John W. Baxter wrote:
>
> Yellow Dog isn't limited to older Macs...they got their temperature control
> (fan control) working for the G5 machines in a release a couple of weeks
> ago. That release also runs on the Mac Mini according to reports (I don't
> have one of those, either).

Yeah, Terra Soft (YDL's producer) is an authorized Apple Reseller and
will sell you current Apple machines with both YDL and OS X
pre-installed. So it certainly does work on current models.

However, personally I find that PowerPC Linux is a way of getting more
life out of older hardware rather than an alternative to OS X, since all
of the Unix software I need will compile and run on OS X. When you run
Linux on a Mac you give up some things that are useful. Commercial
software that's sold or given away that's "for Linux" is always for
Intel Linux and not for PPC Linux. So no Real Player, no Acrobat
Reader. Sometimes there are substitutes (xpdf works well enough),
sometimes not. You also give up iTunes, iMovie, etc. (If Apple ever
produces an "iTunes for Linux", it won't be for PPC Linux.) I'm not
even sure if there's a legal way to watch DVD's on a PPC Linux machine
or not. I'm not going to install Linux on my 2x2 G5 or Powerbook G4
until whatever OS X is then current no longer runs well on them. The
next machine in the house that's going to get Linux installed is my
wife's iBook, which struggles under Panther with the disk filling up
with swap files.

And as you point out, usually PPC Linux lags behind OS X in the ability
to completely control Apple hardware (witness G5 fans now just working
properly). I ran into this myself once. The Airport card on my iMac
died, so I swapped it with the card in my iBook (running YDL 3 at the
time) and ordered a new card. The card in the iBook was a 1st
generation Airport card, ordered the day after Jobs announced the
original clamshell iBook. When the new card arrived, I put it in the
iBook, but then discovered that Linux didn't know how to drive it. So I
had to swap the cards back so that the iBook had the original card that
it knew how to drive.


>
> --john
>


--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

I tried OpenBSD on a IIci in the past. Terminal was OK but you sure
don't want to get into X windows with it. OpenBSD is a nice choice for
things like routers due to it's focus on security.

As I remember, one of the differentiations in the marketing material for
the IIci over the IIsi was that it had the hardware necessary for Apple
A/UX that was Unix for the Mac Hardware. More than a decade
between that Mac OS X. As I remember, it could be run at the same time
as the 'classic' Mac System.

Jonathan Ploudre

One final word on Linux distributions. I strongly recommend Debian or related distributions (including Ubuntu) for anyone who plans to run Linux. One of the best features is Debian's package manager, which Fink is based on, so anyone who's used fink will feel right at home with it. Older versions of Debian were difficult to install, but the current testing release ('Woody') has a very nice installer.

Ubuntu combines the features of Debian with a nice installer and a stable release schedule of updates every 6 months.

I have Ubuntu installed on a G4 set up for dual boot, and I'm using plain Debian on a PC I've set up as a server.

On 23/2/2005 3:15 AM, "Jamie Kahn Genet" <jamiekgwizardling.geek.nz> spake
thus:

> It certainly would be an advantage to be able to transfer some of my OS X CL
> knowledge to whichever UNIX OS I end up with. How similar are various BSD OS's
> to Darwin/Mac OS X?

Pretty close, but Apple has take some liberties with things, as they usually
do :) Some things that are configured under Unix through config files in
/etc are configured through NetInfo on the Mac (think Mac equivalent of the
Windows Registry and you're not far off :) Other things are configured
normally --- it's not particularly consistent, but it has improved over
time.

However, the real test is software. Pretty much if it compiles under a
standard BSD environment, then it should compile under Darwin. The main
exceptions would be the obvious things: assumes specific
hardware/drivers/libraries that aren't available under Darwin. Fortunately
this isn't that common.

FWIW, most of the software in Fink (most if not all of which builds under a
standard BSD environment) builds just fine on Mac OS X with relatively minor
patching. (Having ported several packages to Fink myself, I can say that the
process is relatively painless, usually involving little more than tweaking
the compilation flags. The only real problem I encountered was a header file
in a different location.)

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

On 22 Feb 2005, at 07:15 :26, Jamie Kahn Genet wrote:
> Nigel Stanger <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> [snip]
>> The nice thing about BSD is that Darwin is also a BSD derivative, so
>> you
>> can transfer some BSD knowledge to/from Mac OS X. The only reason I
>> switched to Debian was that it had better package management tools
>> (which
>> may no longer be true).
>> <http://www.netbsd.org/>
> It certainly would be an advantage to be able to transfer some of my
> OS X CL knowledge to whichever UNIX OS I end up with. How similar are
> various BSD OS's to Darwin/Mac OS X?

with the exception of portinstall, nearly identical. Darwin _IS_
largely BSD, after all.

--On February 22, 2005 6:15:24 AM -0800 Paul Schinder <schinderpobox.com>
wrote:

> LinuxPPC died years ago. Currently, in addition to Yellow Dog, SUSE has
> a PPC distribution and so does Debian, and a quick look at debian.org's
> download pages shows a 68k distro as well. I'm not sure if any of the
> newer distributions (Gentoo, Ubuntu) have PPC distros. Yellow Dog is
> based on Fedora Core, so should look familiar to any Red Hat user.

Gentoo has a PPC distribution, and it's what I use on my x86 Linux boxes. I
like it's package distribution better than Debian's, which I used
previously and I prefer the minimal installation. Documentation is pretty
good too. Although it's build from source preference can be a bit slow,
but binary packages are available.

<http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-ppc.xml>

However I don't think any of the large modern Linux distro's support 68k
macs, I think they all require a PowerPC chip.

Linux/m68k supports the kernel, and I think uses debian for the rest of
their system.

<http://www.linux-m68k.org/>

Kevin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cohen [mailto:tidbitsmcdevzone.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:20 AM
> To: tidbits-talktidbits.com
> Subject: Re: Best Unix for old 68k and PPC Macs?

> Older versions of Debian were difficult to install, but the current
> testing release ('Woody') has a very nice installer.

One small correction. "Woody" is the nickname for Debian 3.0 which is the
current stable release. It was released in July 2002 so at this point it's
rather aged. The current testing release is nicknamed "Sarge" and it is
indeed very good. A potentially important detail about Sarge is that on x86
hardware the default Linux kernel for installation is 2.4 but on PowerPC
hardware it is 2.6. I believe the explanation for this is changes in 2.6
haven't really settled down yet but the improvements in it for PowerPC are
too good to pass up.

<http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/>

For the sake of completeness, there's also an Unstable version nicknamed
"Sid." (All the release names are taken from the movie Toy Story.)
"Unstable" in this case indicates changes are made frequently, not that it
is prone to crashing. Unstable is always called Sid; when Sarge becomes the
new stable version (waiting, waiting), a new testing release will be started
and named "etch".

<http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives.html#s-sourceforcodenames>

On 2/23/2005 6:20, "Nigel Stanger" <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

> Some things that are configured under Unix through config files in
> /etc are configured through NetInfo on the Mac (think Mac equivalent of the
> Windows Registry and you're not far off :)

I would put that more like "some things that are configured under many Unix
systems through config files in /etc are configured through NetInfo."

Apple (and NeXT) did not invent NetInfo...NetInfo is no surprise to some
experienced Unix hands (not including this one, who didn't encounter it
until Mac OS X).

   --John

On 2/23/2005 6:20, "Mike Cohen" <tidbitsmcdevzone.com> wrote:

> One final word on Linux distributions. I strongly recommend Debian or
> related distributions (including Ubuntu) for anyone who plans to run Linux.

Debian has advantages as laid out by Mike.

Debian also has an incredibly slow and particularly rigid release cycle, and
is thus perhaps best suited for environments where stability is valued over
being modern. Financial institutions, whose internal testing phase for
anything new can last a year come to mind.

This release cycle causes many problems for developers of components of the
release (such as the Exim Mail Transfer Agent [sendmail
replacement...Postfix has that role in Mac OS X]. The current "stable"
Debian installs an Exim which is so old that the Exim community has
basically forgotten how to help. Further, they use a configuration system
for Exim which makes sense from Debian's point of view, but means that help
from the Exim community is hard to get even if one installs the newest Exim
Debian offers.

Debian is great if you want what they provide. I don't think it is for
"anyone who plans to run Linux." (There is no such distribution.)

  --John

Yes, I was wrong on the name. I'm running Sarge on my x86 box. I've
upgraded it to the 2.6.8 kernel, which is a lot nicer. The only problem
with it is I have a hard time burning CDs since my version of cdrecord
still uses the older IDE-SCSI kludge.

As for Gentoo, I've heard good things about it. However, all packages
are built from source and even people who like it admit it takes over a
day to build some of the larger packages like XFree86 & KDE.

On Feb 23, 2005, at 9:51 AM, Wilcox, Curtis wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mike Cohen [mailto:tidbitsmcdevzone.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:20 AM
>> To: tidbits-talktidbits.com
>> Subject: Re: Best Unix for old 68k and PPC Macs?
>
>> Older versions of Debian were difficult to install, but the current
>> testing release ('Woody') has a very nice installer.
>
> One small correction. "Woody" is the nickname for Debian 3.0 which is
> the
> current stable release. It was released in July 2002 so at this point
> it's
> rather aged. The current testing release is nicknamed "Sarge" and it is
> indeed very good. A potentially important detail about Sarge is that
> on x86
> hardware the default Linux kernel for installation is 2.4 but on
> PowerPC
> hardware it is 2.6. I believe the explanation for this is changes in
> 2.6
> haven't really settled down yet but the improvements in it for PowerPC
> are
> too good to pass up.
>
> <http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/>
>
> For the sake of completeness, there's also an Unstable version
> nicknamed
> "Sid." (All the release names are taken from the movie Toy Story.)
> "Unstable" in this case indicates changes are made frequently, not
> that it
> is prone to crashing. Unstable is always called Sid; when Sarge
> becomes the
> new stable version (waiting, waiting), a new testing release will be
> started
> and named "etch".
>
> <http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives.html#s-
> sourceforcodenames>
>

On 24/2/2005 3:20 AM, "Mike Cohen" <tidbitsmcdevzone.com> spake thus:

> One of the best features is Debian's package manager, which Fink
> is based on, so anyone who's used fink will feel right at home with it.

Well, yes and no. Fink is a layer on top of the Debian package management
tools, and as such behaves somewhat differently from the "raw" Debian tools.
I still find the Debian tools somewhat obscure to use on anything other than
a trivial level, which is probably all that most people need. I generally
find Fink to be more intuitive.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

On 2/24/05 12:35 PM, "Nigel Stanger" <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz>
wrote:

>> One of the best features is Debian's package manager, which Fink
>> is based on, so anyone who's used fink will feel right at home with it.
>
> Well, yes and no. Fink is a layer on top of the Debian package management
> tools, and as such behaves somewhat differently from the "raw" Debian tools.
> I still find the Debian tools somewhat obscure to use on anything other than
> a trivial level, which is probably all that most people need. I generally
> find Fink to be more intuitive.

One warning on package managers, and both Fink and DarwinPorts are quite
guilty here...if you are using them for software that isn't "cool", then the
versions can lag quite badly

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 26/2/2005 4:30 AM, "John C. Welch" <jwelchbynkii.com> spake thus:

> One warning on package managers, and both Fink and DarwinPorts are quite
> guilty here...if you are using them for software that isn't "cool", then the
> versions can lag quite badly

That plus the fact that the packages are all maintained by volunteers. If
the volunteer gets busy with Real Life (or simply loses interest), versions
can lag quite severely too (I've been guilty of this to a small extent with
some of my packages :)

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

hi, to focus a little on the original issue, factors to consider:

1) debian-68k and linux-68k seem to offer slightly different kernel support for macs. linux-68k has offered cross-compiler support for macosX (min panther). debian-68k cross-compiling would be for debian users, say of ppc. there was also an x86 cross-compiler.

2) netbsd and perhaps also openbsd are said to be faster than debian. also among these three the actual hardware supported differs somewhat. debian does offer more packages.

3) as far as old ppc macs goes debian appears to be the only distro which is carrying support forward.

4) it should be interesting when these new motorola processors really get going. part of the justification to support these old machine is they are looking like combining the old and new technology:

eg the coldfire evolves 68k , there are also boards/chips in development which play off the old ppc603. so, looking forward to something decent in a handheld someday, my debian systems should indeed copy over to these things pretty easily, I hope.