On 1/10/2014 3:13 PM, TT wrote:
Really amazing Scott! Thanks for sharing. Would the Linux distro you
created be useful for people to use for other purposes? I still wonder
about someone making updates to A/UX to get some more modern web apps
going, though it may not be possible to make them very usable on the
ancient hardware, especially without a ton of work. Maybe having some
seeds germinate with a time lapse would give an interesting contrast
to the slow boot process. =)
It mostly depends on your definition of "useful". As it stands, plain
console mode is pretty usable, if you're a bit patient. The big
limitation right now is disk access. As happens with old Mac SCSI, it's
very slow. Honestly once programs get running they usually run ok, it's
waiting for the disk to finish churning that's slow. Right now the Linux
boot/root drive is an external SCSI drive. I need to open up the
enclosure and try putting the drive directly in the Mac. I don't think
the LC475 suffers from the issues of slower disk access for external
drives but every bit helps.
There's lots you can do with console mode. Simple games, text adventure
games, IRC, text-mode web browsing through w3m, etc. It's basically as
functional as any modern Linux box would be since it's running a
(mostly) current kernel and libraries.
Right now I'm still tracking issues with X dying when I try to use the
mouse. This is causing me lots of trouble and preventing me from running
much in the way of X apps. However, it's slow enough that I'm not sure
it really matters much. I did run Mozilla on it back in the day when I
had the original ancient Linux running on it, and it wasn't really very
usable. It'd take maybe 5 minutes to get a URL typed in, another 5-10
minutes to load a moderately complex page, and easily more if it was an
especially complex page with Javascript and such. Granted it was a
then-current browser so it was possible to fully browse the web, which
made it interesting. But outside of "neat!" I'm not sure I'd want to
actually try to use it. I mostly used it to have multiple xterms
running, doing various consoley things in anyway. The original classic
Mac OS 7.x or 8.1 were much more usable (and probably still are) with
the plethora of mobile-enabled sites working fairly well on vintage
browsers able to run (iCab, Netscape 4, etc). To my knowledge source
code for the non-Gecko versions of Netscape/Mozilla were never made
available so I have no way of compiling something equally vintage like
Netscape 3 or 4 for m68k Linux.
As for the distro itself, I can't claim any particular credit for it.
The real props go to the Debian m68k mailing list who has been active in
keeping the port alive. It's probably the oldest architecture still
actively supported by Linux and they've put a ton of work into keeping
the kernel booting and working, plus the userland compiled and running.
There are several people keeping old m68k boxes running (mostly Amigas
and an Atari or two) to keep packages built and available. Getting it
installed on a Mac is a little tricky though, so I have been meaning to
write up a process on getting it installed and running on a Mac from
scratch.
I have a IIci that I've had A/UX running on on and off, and one of the
Debian guys has asked me if I could let him access it to try to port
some things to and modernize, but I'm having capacitor problems with it.
I'm hoping to get it recapped sooner or later.
Scott
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