RE: Debian Mac 68k steam
Hi,
>>Sorry for the inconvenience, but the whole Mac project has lost a lot of steam
>>lately.
>
>So the Debian Mac 68k effort specifically is slowing, or the entire Mac 68k
There's no Debian Mac68k effort as such; the guys working on the bootdisks
did their best to make adding new machines easy. I've debianized the Mac fdisk,
replaced kernel and booter on a rescue disk image and provided the US keymaps,
that's all that was required. So it's the entire project.
>effort? How much of a user base do you think is out there now? I would
According to Geert's registration site, 82 registered Mac users, or 6.7% of
the total.
>imagine that many Mac users would not be looking for a Linux port, but I
>suspect a solid Debian distribution would be well received by those
>interested.
The average Mac user might be neither inclined to use anything like Unix at
all, or to do things like manual installation of filesystems or kernel hacking.
Debian would be what most of these users might need, but the kernel support
isn't quite there yet for some of the most interesting machines.
Surprisingly, there are a number of Mac users who figured out how to install
the old watchtower system the hard way, even for use as NFS root, at a time
where neither disk nor keyboard was supported. They must have really been fed
up with Apples support for the m68k Macs, or real adventurous ... Plus there is
quite a large user base in the NetBSD camp. I don't question the potential user
base so much as the 'kernel hacker' base. Maybe that's coming in future
(building a kernel on a 16 MHz 68030 with max. 30k/sec disk I/O rate isn't my
sort of fun either). And maybe I overestimate the number of active kernel
hackers in the m68k team, and it wasn't much different there...
Michael
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