debian-68k on two macs
hi, i have just put Sarge on an old mac performa450 (lcIII),
has 36MB ram and 68030 CPU with no FPU.
my goal is to get debian installed and running on a powerbook540c.
(my experience: i have been running debian for about 6months on
two powermacs, both sarge and etch, one is a stock early '97 and the other
a souped up 2000; before that i worked with BSD Unix some years and
other things, but the last few years the old mac os, and no programming
for a long time although some admin stuffs)
i thought someone had got that going this year but i may have been
dreaming, anyway i picked up one with 36MB Ram at a yard sale recently,
for $20. i also have a 520c that i have had for a couple years running
macos, but it only had 20MB ram. there seem to be some difference
besides speed and memory between the two, for instance on program
i had for macos that would crash predictably seems to run ok on the 540
but not on either of the other two.
anyway, putting sarge on the lcIII it took a full 8 hours, that is for
the absolute base minimum. should it have taken that long ? how much
faster would it be
if i added the fpu ?
i have some (runtime) error, and i wonder if in fact i could rather
customize the setup a bit more. one thing is there is no ethernet card
in it now, but the
installer was very insistent about wanting to set up a network. i am getting
frequent errors of bunches of "neighbor table overflow" which i look up
with google, says my loopback, ie lo interface is bad. maybe i should kill
MTA/exim for the time being ?
i can get an FPU for $20 if it would help significantly. another thing i *might*
do is buy a sonnet presto plus card, with or without fpu, i found this hack
of penguin booter to use it.
II) of course i wanted to get the 540 going. one thing i did here unorthodox
perhaps. i use the 540 in powerbook disk mode as external disk to the
lcIII and i put sarge on that. I know, i have been told that sarge, or at
least 2.2 kernels won't run on 540. however, there were two reasons i did
this: a) i could preformat the disk from my powerbook3400, and now
i can do fast data transfers and downloads to the disk that way. (maybe
if i were skillful i could even use that method to install packages, with chroot
and/or dpkg ??)
b) when upgradeing the 97 mac to etch, i start with sarge
and (change my sources.list to point to testing, maybe optional)
apt-get -t testing linux-image-2.6.15-1-powerpc. so i am wondering
if i can get the 540 going that way. actually i might prefer to run a mix
sarge/etch if possible,
note i have cd-1 of both sarge and etch-beta, got about two weeks ago. also
i found the recent update by reading the list here that you had gotten
2.6.17 kernel and i downloaded that. but i have lost any links i might have
had to recent successes with 500 series powerbook except for the
emile home page which shows a 520c booting.
yes, i have used emile a little. rescue disk and cd-install both used.
i like the fact that this minimal install only uses 100MB on my disk, i was
worried the whole time the installer was running that the disk was full
(is only about 400MB there). also the memory use so far is only about 10MB.
it is just the performance bothers me. perhaps be ok with the 'LC040 ?
very glad to see 68k is getting through the bottleneck with regard to etch
upgrade. i would personally really like to see a lighter hand of the policies
for a light debian. for instance, maybe 5 years ago you could run kde
on one of these machines but not today, it is unreasonable to force the
port to have it if it could never run here. or am i wrong ? one thing
is it does test to build it. another is with "thin client" package maybe
you want a little bit of it if you can have a server backend doing most of it.
(but personally i prefer the lightweight window managers /desktops anyway).
how about the ARM port they are really getting squeezed too. it seems
pretty unfair and heavy handed, political to me, although again maybe
there are reasonable reasons.
i am pretty serious about the philosophy of free software, openness,
inclusiveness, affordability, useability, diversity, as well as some
artistic
ideals about designs ...
brian
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