Re: status of linux mac68k kernel
well you can read the recent list archives about debian-68k,
its a bit chaotic right now.
i have been using gnustep a little on powerpc, and building
some upstream, or trying to. because of much recent advances
in gnustep - a pleasant surprise - etch at least is required to
have recent gnustep apps going. thus requires 2.6 kernels.
i don't plan to try and use it here in the anywhere near future
though, unless it were at the level of programming in objective-c
without the gui. actually i think there is a need for that, too much
prototypeing solely at the gui level and unimplemented or minimal
functionality (in terms of processing, if you get me)
that is one reason i think packages get cut, or not introduced at all.
my own plans for my 68k machines (if the current issues are
resolvable) are to do basic r&d of some algorithms at the processing
level. for example if you know of the gnustep app gtamsanalyzer, i
would like to be able to do some pre and post processing of data for
that (generating and validating tags).
the current transition from sarge to etch has been both pretty
disruptive and pretty badly needed for my work, hope it settles
down somehow pretty soon. well reasonably soon.
my interest here right now on 68k is maybe to salvage some of
the notebooks support, if anyone has any of those such as 160s,
180s, 190s, duos; my 520 and 540 are probably the toughest cases.
part of my experience gnustep on a low memory ppc notebook was
windowmaker is not so hot, openbox has supported gnusteps apps
fairly well and runs much more efficiently. i wish i knew some ways to
trim down Xwindows in general. another important application
i would like to support is dillo, which is not gnustep but is our
best hope it would seem for a lite browser.
hope you can reintroduce those apps updated for xorg, and latest
gnustep, as both are big improvements (IMHO amongst the top 5)
brian
On 9/23/06, Riccardo <riccardo@kaffe.org> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a long-time 68k user, especially with debian, since it was my first
linux computer back then and the same IIfx is still faithfully working.
I followed the linux-mac68k list for a long time, but apparently it
"died off" and nobody knows who managed the computer thus I was advised
to subscribe here. I use debian anyway and I think there are no other
68k distributions anymore anyway.
I was quite busy in the past months but I will try in the future to use
and test 68k again a bit more. I like to check that the projects [*] I
am involved in work and compile fine on 68k.
Unfortunately the boxes I have currently working, a IIfx and a Q950,
run a 2.2.25 kernel which was problematic the past year (bad
performance, serious network problems on the IIfx, no SCSI DMA on both
boxes) but after I run an apt update I notice that more packages and
especially start-up scripts cry for a 2.4 or a 2.6 series kernel.
I know 2.4 has always been unlucky on mac but about a year ago I tried
to do several test builds of the 2.6 series and there were indeed
promising news, although it was not yet day-to-day usable to me. Also
the build process was cumbersome (it did build only on gcc 3.0
toolchains or it would not boot) and the kernels I built only attempted
booting on the Q950 and not the IIfx.
I compiled and tested on a well-equipped Q840 which, unfortunately, is
currently broken (PSU).
Are there promising news? Is there interest in testing these particular
architectures at all?
Cheers,
Riccardo
[*] these projects would be the kaffe Java VM, GNUstep and the related
Gnustep Application Project. Further I wrote PRICE, a gnustep image
filtering program, and pico server, a minimal webserver which suits 68k
pretty well. Neither pico server nor some of the gnsutep applications
are currently in debian though.
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