Hey all, I've recently come into possession of a batch of old Macs, including some m68k machines. Having known people for years who ran Linux on their Macs, I have a fair idea how to get Linux loaded on these machines, but I'm running into a couple problems with one machine, at least in part because of how underpowered it is. The machine in question is an LC III with an 80MB hard drive -- big enough, I believe, to get a small root partition on there and NFS mount the rest; and powerful enough to do some compiling and testing if I'm patient, which is all I plan to use the machine for. Trouble is, being so small, the drive naturally only has one partition on it. I've tried popping the drive into my x86 machine and manually shrinking the partition, but my best efforts at copying the data onto a smaller partition still render the system unbootable. Since this machine only has floppy & network, I'm not enthusiastic about having to do a fresh install of MacOS after partitioning only to turn around and install Linux. So my questions are basically twofold: What's the smallest MacOS partition I can get away with for use in bootstrapping Linux, and what do I need to have on there? Is there a way to unpack everything onto the drive while I have it hooked up to my Linux server, such that I can just drop the drive back into the LC III and boot into Linux? Ideally, I'd love it if someone could float me a barebones partition image that I could dd to the drive and use for the MacOS bootloader; but barring that[1], any pointers would be appreciated. Cheers, Steve Langasek postmodern programmer [1] E.g., although I know System 7.5.3 is a free download, I haven't looked if it's legal to redistribute.
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