On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:43:30PM -0400, Rick Genter wrote:
> I have a PowerBook 540c; I've had it since I bought it back in 1994
> when they first came out. Recently I dug it out of my old hardware
> closet and fired it up. It still works just fine, though the battery
> won't hold a charge.
>
> My observation is that Linux generally works better on slow hardware
> than the "native" graphical OSes such as Windows or MacOS, so I decided
> I wanted to try and put Linux on my PowerBook. After investigation,
> though, it looks like Linux is currently not quite there for my
> PowerBook:
>
> - the 68K implementations don't support the 68LC040
> - the Macintosh 68K implementations don't boot natively; you have to
> through a MacOS-based bootloader, requiring a MacOS partition on the
> hard drive
>
> That being the case, and being a believe, I'd like to volunteer to help
> make the PowerBook 540c a first-class Linux citizen. My question: where
> would my efforts be best applied? 68LC040 support? Nativing booting?
> Somewhere else?
The LC040 support, probably, even if it's deemed nearly impossible to
do. The problem is not the LC040 per se; the problem is that there are
quite a bunch of bad LC040 processors out there. These work incorrectly
in that they do not correctly keep their registers when an FPU interrupt
goes off; as a result, the kernel returns to an incorrect CPU state
after handling the FPU, so stuff obviously doesn't work.
Not being a kernel hacker myself, I've been told that it may be
impossible to work around this processor bug.
That said, there are also other issues with the m68k powerbooks, in that
the ADB support isn't (fully) working; as a result, you could be able to
boot it into Linux, but not type anything except through a serial
console...
--
EARTH
smog | bricks
AIR -- mud -- FIRE
soda water | tequila
WATER
-- with thanks to fortune
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature