Richard,Thanks a lot for your patience, that is all very helpful. I have a macintosh SE (not 30) with system 7 but it seems it's going to stay that way (no PMMU, as you gentlefully pointed out). Fortunately, i rescued from the trash a powerbook 520c which happens to be listed on the 2.6 kernel page. I have a few other newb questions about its abitiy to get some kind of networking (any kind, actually ;) with debian-68k, amongst other things. The page http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/status/MAC_MODEL_PB520.php states :
1. PMU ADB: Status unknown.I suppose ADB is the apple desktop bus: does it mean that there is no known way to use its native keyboard/mouse ? If so, is there any alternative ?
2. NCR5380 SCSI: BrokenDoes that mean that it will not use scsi at all ? I'm not certain the internal hard drive is scsi (it's not very clear to me from the specs).
3. Serial: Broken. Cannot be used from userspace, but can be used for kernel debugging. My understanding is that I would not be able to use it to get TCP/IP with a null-modem cable as I'm doing with the Macintosh SE right now.
3. SONIC ethernet: OK.Is that the internal AAUI ethernet controler ? That'd be great because I found a working adapter to hook it on a regular ethernet switch.
4.NuBus: If initialized by MacOS, some cards can cause an early kernel panic on some models. Workaround: boot MacOS with extensions off, or use Emile instead of Penguin. I suppose i'm just too green to understand what it means yet, for now the only peripheral I tried to plug was an Asanté micro en/sc (and that's scsi), with no success but I didnt try very long thanks to the AAUI ethernet adapter.
Any pointers appreciated. Tomte richard wrote:
Tomte, That page for kernel 2.6 is at http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/status/And for kernel 2.2 it is http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/status/v2.2/index.htmlThe reason it is complicated is that there were some Mac versions did not have a PMMU (Paged Memory Management Unit). A PMMU is essential for any 680x0 based Macintosh to run Linux.Basically the first Macintosh computers that can run Debian are the SE/30, the Mac II series, and the Powerbook 140 as they do have PMMUs. Since Apple was rather innovative with hardware (a good thing generally) some features may work less than perfectly. I have an SE/30 for which I installed Debian potato with a 2.2 kernel. I upgraded to a 2.6 kernel and it's choppy now. When the etch version is all the way ready for m68k, I want to try a clean install.Richard Waterfield LilleTomte wrote:Hi all,Apologies if this is obvious but I could not find this info on the website : I understand that only 68k with MMU will work with debian 68k, but is there a list around with all the computers _known_ to work on this distribution ? It says on the site "Current Debian releases support Atari, Amiga, VMEbus, and some Macintosh systems." But I'd love to find something a bit more specific so I know what to look for.Regards, Tomte.