Re: rh

[Michael Schmitz <schmitz@mail.biophys.uni-duesseldorf.de>]

> > hi list,
> > i want to know where i can find or buy red hat m68k for my mac 68k
> 
> Not sure if you know where you asked, debian-m68k is the mailing

Seems some people are blissfully unaware of the distribution wars going on
for other archs :-) 

> list for Debian GNU/Linux for m68k.  You don't need a Red Hat
> version, the Debian distribution for m68k is more than enough.

That's the short (and somewhat biased :-) answer from a Debian guy. The
long answer: Red Hat never sold or manufactured a m68k distribution. The
m68k kernel maintainer created a 5.1 or 5.2 port of Red Hat privately,
with no more support by RH than setting up a mailing list. This inofficial
Red Hat port is neither endorsed nor supported by Red Hat in any way. It
only supports installation on Amigas - Jes left the porting of the
installer to other machines as an exercise to the interested m68k hacker.
For all I know, he also left maintaining and updating the RH port as an
exercise to said m68k hacker. I guess Jes did the initial port because he
liked Red Hat more than Debian, and as a generic proof of its feasability,
and he's higly to be commended for that. 

As evident from the problems in the Debian/68k port, interested m68k
hackers seem pretty low abundant. The lack of Atari and Mac installers has
been clamored about, there's been some talk about people starting to work
on a Mac installer (Alex de Vries from the Puffin group was the first, but
he seems to have been sidetracked by the PA/RISC port. I forgot who was
the second). So far, nothing materialized to the best of my knowledge. 

Relying on the users to carry on the effort, without having a critical
mass of hackers to count on - talk about exercise in futility. 

There's a lesson to be learned from this (and it's not "m68k is dead
anyway"). I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader :-)

	Michael