Best *nix for LC with 10megs ram?

[junkman]

Hello,

I have a LC II with 10megs of ram and a MMXL99 33mhz 68881 card. 

YEARS ago I had NetBSD 1.6.? running on this. I dug it out and the quantum viking drive that had NetBSD on it is dead. The original 80meg drive with 7.x on it still boots. I had them both rigged in there with a multi tap SCSI cable and power Y cable.

  I ordered a SCSI2SD to play with. My plan is to set it up with multiple virtual hard drives in there one with the MacOS to boot and use MacOS apps and to bootstrap a unix on the 2nd virtual drive.

My 1st question is it possible to copy MacOS off the working drive to the new drive and make it bootable? Or does MacOS need to be installed from floppy?

My 2nd question is what would be the most "usable" *nix on such a low end machine?

I don't mind running NetBSD 1.6 again but I cant find anywhere an archive of the 1.6 binary pkgs repository. They have vanished form the internet. The oldest pkgs repository I can find is 6.x. I was looking at newer version of NetBSD and the compressed kernal is over 2megs now. I think this will eat up all my little ram.  I would like to have an irc client, maybe a httpd and a few other random things installed on here.

For networking I plan on just using SLIP(or PPP) on rs232 to my NetBSD PPC machine.

 

[Gorgonops]

My 1st question is it possible to copy MacOS off the working drive to the new drive and make it bootable? Or does MacOS need to be installed from floppy?

That's the easy part. To clone to a new disk all you need to do is select the folders you want (Obviously the System folder is the main piece you need) and drag them over to the new drive. (Once you have it partitioned and formatted, obviously.) Then double-click on the cloned System folder to make sure it's "blessed". And that should be it.

As for question #2, NetBSD is probably still your best choice, although I agree the current version is likely to be a really tight fit in 10MB. Last I checked the Sun2 version of it still booted and could go multi-user in as little as 4MB, but what you could actually accomplish beyond that... I have no idea. I don't think the 2MB size of the kernel before loading is *necessarily* is a deal-breaker, I don't think it keeps any drivers that it's not actually using memory-resident, but I do wonder if you might be able to build a custom one omitting certain things that you don't necessarily need to trim it a bit more. Leave out the firewall stuff, for instance? It's been *years* since I built a NetBSD kernel so I might not be making sense anymore.

 

[junkman]

That's the easy part. To clone to a new disk all you need to do is select the folders you want (Obviously the System folder is the main piece you need) and drag them over to the new drive. (Once you have it partitioned and formatted, obviously.) Then double-click on the cloned System folder to make sure it's "blessed". And that should be it.

As for question #2, NetBSD is probably still your best choice, although I agree the current version is likely to be a really tight fit in 10MB. Last I checked the Sun2 version of it still booted and could go multi-user in as little as 4MB, but what you could actually accomplish beyond that... I have no idea. I don't think the 2MB size of the kernel before loading is *necessarily* is a deal-breaker, I don't think it keeps any drivers that it's not actually using memory-resident, but I do wonder if you might be able to build a custom one omitting certain things that you don't necessarily need to trim it a bit more. Leave out the firewall stuff, for instance? It's been *years* since I built a NetBSD kernel so I might not be making sense anymore.

Thanks for the reply. OK I will try dragging the System Folder over to the new "drive" when it gets here hopefully soon. 

I found a very sick sounding old Apple 80meg SCSI in one of my junk piles to mess with in the meantime and managed to get some different versions of NetBSD on there. 1st I had a problem with what I thought was my drive failing but as it turns out there is a issue with some SCSI driver on low mem machines and thats why they have a "SBC" kernel. I could have saved tons of time if I RTFM 1st. 

7.1 hangs when it started to probe the drives. Aval mem was only 5000k or so after it loaded the kernel.Even if it did manage to boot I don't think I would have any ram left. 

2.0 booted but in single user mode 'vmstat' only reports 2288 free. Multi-user mode made the system unstable and I kept having an issue with it detecting a phantom sd1 drive which messed up fstab because now everything was shifted up to "sd2".

1.6.2 booted and seems quicker and reports 3196 free in single user mode. It also goes to multi user fine and after everything is up and running I have a little over a meg free in vmstat. The system isn't paging anything to swap at all yet. All the programs in "base" run and respond at reasonable speed. I'll bet I can trim even more out of the kernel when I get some drives pace to work with. Right now I am at 90% with just "base", "etc", and the kernel installed. 

If I could just find a copy of the old NetBSD.org 1.6 mac68k "packages" directory I would be all set. I am hoping I can find some long forgotten about mirror or something. NetBSD.org archived the i386 packages but it seems they deleted the other arches.

 

[Gorgonops]

Man, you're right about the binary archives of 1.6 packages falling off the face of the planet. Even archive.org came up dry.

 

[IIfx]

Is it possible that the NetBSD project has the 1.6 packages archived someplace off the web? It may be worth reaching out to the project maintainers if possible.

 

[junkman]

Good idea. Ill ask on the mailing list..

I got the SCSI2SD thing in the mail and it works MINT. Its no nice not having fight with old drives anymore.
NetBSD 1.6.2 is installed and working. The 1.6.2 sysinst can't deal with the large drive (I made "/" 2gigs). So i ended up using 6.1's systinst but pointing it at the package sets for 1.6.2. I didn't try doing any of the extra config stuff. I just let it make the filesystem and install the sets. Then exited.

I ordered an ethernet card off ebay but it connects to the connector that the MMXL99 33mhz 68881 card uses. I thought I could just remove that and chug along at 12mhz but NetBSD seems to really want that 68881 to work correctly. It if you try to do anything other then just logging in it hangs.

So I ended up just making a null modem cable and using SLIP to connect to my NetBSD/macppc machine. It works well.

The system is S-L-O-W but it seems stable so far.

 

[johnklos]

I started writing to say that I don't think I'd still have binary packages from so long ago still around (and I still doubt I do), but then I looked around...

At very least, I still have NetBSD 4 sets for mac68k which are compiled with softfloat and therefore don't need an FPU. Also, on an m68030, FPU emulation should work just fine. It was the LC040s with the broken trap handling that had problems with emulating an FPU. What kind of problems are you seeing when you run without your m68881?

The best thing to do may be to run a newer version of NetBSD but with a trimmed down kernel, particularly because hardly any new software is going to build correctly or easily on such an old toolchain. A new softfloat snapshot would be good, but first I'll have to see what's preventing libm from compiling...

 

[Bolle]

You can also solder a socket for an 881/882 onto the LC II logicboard and just drop a FPU in right there freeing the PDS slot.

 

[junkman]

Johnkos, Yes I think your right. I was starting to read up on cross compiling a kernel and going to something newer may be my best bet for a 68K machine. The problem I was having was you could log in and "ls". But as soon as you tried running anything larger like "top" the system would hang. No panic or anything just a hang.

Bolle. Wow thats good to know.. may be on my next 68K I will try that. I say "next" because it seems I killed my little LC

I had it all cleaned up, put together and up on the shelf next to my other severs. I compiled ircII (a 2001 version) and that took a while (like over night) because it was paging so hard. I had to log in to the console to change a user to the wheel group so i could unzip the kernel source to start working on that. The console was full of buffer overrun messages I think which are from the SLIP serial port being set at 115200. And there was some error about a scsi drive.  I couldn't get the keyboard to respond but I could still ping and login via telnet. So I gave up and powered off. Now it wont boot up. Just a white screen. Tried putting in the old IBM drive, no MMXL99 board, re-seated the ram, pulled the battery.. nothing

 

[johnklos]

If you haven't recapped your machine and power supply, it's probably time. I haven't seen any '030 that hasn't needed new caps yet.

With regards to BSD, cross compiling a kernel is completely painless. There's a kernel configuration file called "SMALLRAM" meant for a Mac with 8 MB or more. If you have a dmesg from your current system, we can make sure that it doesn't have anything removed that you need, but nothing stands out (except, perhaps, FPU_EMULATE).

You may already know, junkman, but for anyone else all you'd need to do once you have the source tree downloaded is run:

./build.sh -m mac68k tools kernel=SMALLRAM

on any reasonably Unixlike OS (Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, whatever). That's it. It's literally that easy. You can add "-j" followed by the number of cores in your system to speed things up, if you like. The command compiles the GNU toolchain targetting m68k NetBSD, then uses that toolchain to compile the kernel.

BTW - if you use the NetBSD tools that run in Mac OS / System 7, then you'll run in to size issues. If you use Apple HD/SC to partition your drive and have large, multi-gigabyte partitions set aside for NetBSD, you can newfs them and use them once NetBSD is booted (perhaps with the installation kernel).

 

[ChristTrekker]

It's possible ... just maybe ... that I have 1.6 CDs sitting on a spindle somewhere. That was the first version I ever used. I don't have any mac68k hardware anymore, but may still have that media.

 

[johnklos]

You can download any version of NetBSD back to 1.0 here:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.6.2/mac68k

I bet you can still easily compile 1.6 on a modern system...

 

[dr.zeissler]

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