I have a Mac IIcx that has been sitting on a shelf for all of too long, and I would like to pull it down and play with it. I am tired of OS 7.5, so is there a way I could put a distro of linux on it? I dont expect a GUI to work very well, but I think a text mode thing might work well. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
John
It seems like it's possible, but I'm wondering how much you'd be able to do on a 16Mhz pair of 68030 and 68881's. Still, this isn't always about speed, but trying something new. The IIcx is supported by the m68k project, but any details about getting it on there is beyond my experience.
http://www.linux-m68k.org/
A decade or so ago I had Linux with a GUI running on my 80386sx 16MHz with 8MB RAM.
It ran a bit slowly, but it worked...
And if it was possible on that kind of HW...
You can run something like twm on it. NetBSD also will run fine on it. I used to run NetBSD on a IIsi with 5mb RAM and an 80MB HDD. That was around NetBSD 1.4.2ish or so. I had used the HDD in a Q700 to compile a new kernel on a faster system with more RAM, but I got it trimmed pretty far so that all I had were the basics to get things running, and have ethernet. If you've got 8MB or more of RAM, you can run NetBSD just fine.
well i doubt ill be doing it at all... i cant get it to boot. the lights will flash on the keyboard, but thats it. no hard drive humming. no chimes of doom. nohing. maybe thats why i put it away....
John
Is the HDD suffering "sticktion"? The old Quantum ProDrives do that alot now-a-days. Turns out, just this evening I drove by a house that had a stack of stuff for the trash truck. I stopped and asked the people there if I could scavenge (they were right there, so I thought I'd be polite) and found a fully working 8500/120 with 2.5GB HDD and 160MB RAM, a LW Select 360, a 1710AV, and a full-bore IIcx! Talk about timing. It's got a 40MB ProDrive, 16MB RAM, a 230MB external HDD and a CD300. The only problem is the video doesn't work with the 1710AV, non does it like my Acer LCD panel which just blinks off and on. It worked just enough to get the machine running and check that, yes!, those really are 4MB SIMMs in there. The problem still persists with a RasterOps 24SX NuBus card in place of the Mac II Display card. if I can get the video working, I'll try NetBSD and/or Linux. It might just need me to run down to the lab and use a real, older, Apple monitor.
nice score, Jon!
I've been meaning to pull my 8500/180 out of the dust and install Darwin 6.x on it... so many projects, so little time
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The IIcx will take up to 128MB RAM, if you can find the SIMMS, which I'd say is decent.
3 Nubus slots... think 3 ethernet interfaces...
I've heard that linux is sluggish on the 68030s (and the 68040s).
I'd love to put linux on a classic mac, but I'd love it more if I had a 100MHz PowerPC601 upgrade in it...
For the 68030s, I'd definately stick to headless NetBSD, no GUI.
Pull the floppy and original HD (80-160mb?) and replace with 2 nicer 2GB-4GB scsi HDs.
use for: webserver/commandline game server/mail server... who knows? DNS? DHCP? torrent server? Proxy?
I'm going to work on Ubuntu for the 8500 sometime, and I've already done the 16MB upgrade on the 360.
Now it just needs a new toner cart as it leaves two very wide dark streaks down every page. At least getting Ubuntu to use the 360 was dang near painless. It just wanted me to tell it what it was, no autodetect like OS 9.1 did.
well that might be the case with my IIcx but I dunno. It's probably worth it to put one of my old SCSI drives in it to see if I can get it running agian. But it has got one bad problem, out of my 6 nubus video cards, none of them seem to work in my mac II or IIcx, but ive yet to try them in my 8100/100.
Thanks,
John