nomic
12-11-2002, 06:51 PM
I just "inherited" a PowerMac 7100/80 (16M ram, 700M hd, NuBus) that currently has MacOS 7.6.1 on it. I'd like to make a little project out of installing some flavor of linux on it.
I'm a long-time Slack user on Intel hardware, but I'm having a hard time grasping how exactly I'd get anything other than MkLinux working on this hardware. I understand that apparently none of the major PPC Linux distros support NuBus boxen "out-of-the-box," and I understand that my options are using MkLinux (an idea which I'd like to shy away from in favor of using a more standard, less quirky distro) or somehow using the NuBus PPC Kernel Port (http://nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net/) with another distro.
I'm leaning towards Slackintosh (http://slackintosh.exploits.org/) or Debian. I've done a bit of homework on this, and I'm still lost as to how to actually get the process going with the NuBus kernel. Is there a HOWTO somewhere I'm missing?
Also, I don't have any of the original installation media for the box and I'd like to dual boot MacOS and Linux (just a small, functional non-gui desktop). Are there any free tools out there to non-destructively resize the existing MacOS partition?
There's a chance I may accumulate more of these older PPC boxes in the near future, and I'm interested in possibly running a cluster or putting them to work as thin clients for a nonprofit. Any help you could give me would be put to good use.
I'm a long-time Slack user on Intel hardware, but I'm having a hard time grasping how exactly I'd get anything other than MkLinux working on this hardware. I understand that apparently none of the major PPC Linux distros support NuBus boxen "out-of-the-box," and I understand that my options are using MkLinux (an idea which I'd like to shy away from in favor of using a more standard, less quirky distro) or somehow using the NuBus PPC Kernel Port (http://nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net/) with another distro.
I'm leaning towards Slackintosh (http://slackintosh.exploits.org/) or Debian. I've done a bit of homework on this, and I'm still lost as to how to actually get the process going with the NuBus kernel. Is there a HOWTO somewhere I'm missing?
Also, I don't have any of the original installation media for the box and I'd like to dual boot MacOS and Linux (just a small, functional non-gui desktop). Are there any free tools out there to non-destructively resize the existing MacOS partition?
There's a chance I may accumulate more of these older PPC boxes in the near future, and I'm interested in possibly running a cluster or putting them to work as thin clients for a nonprofit. Any help you could give me would be put to good use.