Linux on Mac 68k where to start?

[zastin17]

Hi all, this is my first post.

I got a Powerbook 165 with 8 MB of RAM and an 80 MB HD running MacOS 7.1.1.

What I'd like to do is run Linux on the PB165. I've read a little of the debian linux on mac 68k material

but find the EMILE project (last change was July 2008) more interesting. I don't really want to boot

Linux through Penguin (I'm afraid I won't learn anything through that method).

The first step I've made is downloaded the rescue floppy binary and wrote it to a floppy to boot.

It boots fine, but there doesn't seem to be a keyboard driver as I cannot press 'Enter' to activate

the console. Nothing from the keyboard is registering. Any advice?

So to my main question. I'll need an environment in order to build new kernels, et. al. I was wondering

if there are pre-existing build environments? Obviously, I'd like to use modern hardware and have

a cross-compiler to build the kernel and root file system. Any advice? What would be great is if there

was a vagrantbox available with the toolchain ready.

That leads me to another question. So I used Slackware to install Linux on an IBM PS/2 model 70.

It was a very good experience because there were plenty of pieces available in which I could use

in order to boot linux and mount a root file system. The floppies were designed so that it had a simple

boot loader which offered the user the option to boot linux with customizable perameters. So for instance,

I could boot the floppy and direct the kernel to look for rootfs on a parallel Zip disk I had installed.

This obviously depended on whether the kernel contained the required drivers to talk to the drive.

Or, I could tell the kernel through the boot parameter to mount root off of the floppy and the kernel

would prompt me to replace the floppy. I was wondering if the debian material provides those capabilities

for the Mac platform (68k)?  Thanks.

 

[johnklos]

I remember Slackware on floppy from the '90s. I don't think any contemporary GNU/Linux is going to support floppies, but pretty much all Unix-like OSes support rooting your filesystem anywhere that the kernel can see.

A cross-building environment will be... Interesting. But you talk about things as though you're not looking for easy, so perhaps this is what you're looking for. Debian/m68k folks are working hard on building what they can, and I remember seeing some discussion not long ago about collecting pieces to bootstrap the OS, but you'll have to look on the mailing lists for details.

GNU/Linux on an 80 meg drive, though? I don't think you're going to be able to do anything meaningful with 80 megs of space. Even with NetBSD, you'd only be able to boot and run the OS - you definitely wouldn't have room for a toolchain. Perhaps via NFS?

Whatever you end up doing, keep us up to date, and we'll help where we can. Welcome!

 

[zastin17]

You're right, 80 MB may not be enough. My IBM PS/2 has got 80 MB and Linux fits only because I dedicated the drive to Linux. And I didn't install the development tools. I believe that the partition map and the driver partition are requirements (for the Mac). So I'm unsure if I'm able to replace the HFS partition. I believe EMILE suggests that HFS can be replaced with Ext2.

I was thinking that a better option is to use Penguin to boot Linux in order to build a root file system on a Zip disk (as you suggest). Slackware was a great learning experience because I needed only two floppies in order to install a system. The root file system floppy has a minix file system with just enough functionality to mount a disk and run a setup script. But what I liked about it was how flexible it was to boot. Penguin would allow me that flexibility as well. But ideally I prefer a flexible booter from a floppy (than having to boot MacOS and then boot Linux -- that's a long time between reboots). 

Believe it or not, the EMILE project has got a cross-compiler in a deb package. So it's possible that I can install an i386 debian system and then install those tools. Voila! cross-compiler. Lol. I don't think it will be that easy. But I'll give it a try.

Thanks for responding to my questions.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Welcome aboard!

 

[jack]

My personal reccomendation would be NetBSD for mac68k rather than Linux; it'll run (relatively) faster, not to mention I think mac68k has more support in the NetBSD world.

But your mileage may vary.

Disadvantage would be the boot process. IIRC, NetBSD needs you to run a booter program from Mac OS to boot.

 

[zastin17]

Thanks Trash80_toHP_Mini

Thanks for the suggestion jack. I'll try anything that works. 

 

[dchang]

So I don't know what happened but my account was removed.

Anyway, I'm back now.

So it looks like the EMILE project has updates to 2014.

https://gitorious.org/emile/mainline

I'm still using the files from the old site on sourceforge.net.

It has 2x boot images+rescue image, i.e. 

boot-2.2.27-rc2_0.12.bin

boot-2.6.18-mac_0.12.bin

Both boot, but on my PB145 (I have 3x PB now ...  ) the 2.6.18 doesn't have enough memory.

But 2.2.27 works fine only I don't have a root disk.

Question: (I believe this question will apply to Penguin booting as well)

The root disk: is the kernel looking for a Mac partitioned disk?

The kernel sees the 2x SCSI drives I have, i.e. internal scsi disk (/dev/sda) and the scsi zip drive (/dev/sdb),

but the zip disk has a partition table/map that the kernel doesn't understand.