> Hello Everyone!
>
> This is to let everyone on these list know about my progress
> concerning Gentoo/m68k. I have been working for the past month on the
> port and have made signifigant progress. Portage is working, and a
> Stage1 has been built. However, I was overzealous with my CFLAGS and
> added -O3, which made my Stage1 chroot do odd things.
>
> Then, I decided to rebuild the entire system, but Debian's gcc
> package broke, which had me cursing for about 2 weeks. I had glibc
> builds failing left and right. (Well, actually, only one failed every
> day, since I'm on a 33MHz machine. :)
>
> Anyhow, that's all fixed now, and I hope to have an official stage1
> tarball ready soon. What this e-mail is for is to hopefully gather
> interest in the port so that the powers that be may make it an
> official Gentoo architecture. I realize that m68k is 10-years old,
> but it still has several uses, and Gentoo can fulfil those uses quite
> nicely. I have two Sun 3/80s that serve as DNS for me, and a Performa
> 550 as a NTP server, A Quadra 660AV for video, etc. As the Monty
> Python line goes, "They're Not Dead Yet!"
>
> With Gentoo, we'll be able to squeeze every last bit of performance
> out of these old beasts, as well as trim down the distribution to a
> minimum, lending itself to netbooding and embedded work. m68k
> hardware covers a vast landscape, including but not limited to
> Macintosh, NeXT, Sun3, HP300, Amiga, and Atari. These machines were
> high-end at the time, and can still be put to good use.
>
> Thanks for reading, and if you're interested in the work I've done,
> please reply, so I can know that what I've done is worth releasing,
> and the fine folks at Gentoo can know that m68k is a platform worth
> supporting.
>
> Zach Lowry || Murfreesboro, TN || www.zachlowry.net
> Linux / *BSD / Irix / Solaris / Apple / Unix Network Administration
I actually had an idea to do this close to a year ago, however, I soon found that it required programming skills I didn't have. I still don't have them, but I'll be starting a computer science major in August, so I look forward to helping out however I can in the future. My personal reason for the port was to get an Apple Laserwriter (I don't remember the specific model, the machine itself is safe in a box) to accept print requests from machines other than its Macintosh LC III host. Turns out that there was some write-once on-printer programming involved in installing the printer as part of the installation procedure which permanently identified it as either Mac or PC compatible.
All this was initially used about 11 years ago, and about 5 years ago my father got into this mess when he switched to PC. Unfortunately, I was not the IT wunderkind that I am today (though I am most assuredly in my present company) at that time, and I can only work off my father's vague memories of things he only half understood. The moral of the story? Please try and find a way to make a Mac printer accessible via Samba, or a similar method. I'm sure that's more easily said than done, but I feel it would be a worthwhile use of time and energy. After all, that printer can hit somewhere around 15 pages per minute even on a bad day, it'd make a nice workhorse for printing manuals.
Thanks for your effort,
Robert H. Haener IV
