NetBSD

A while back I got an “OldWorld” PPC Macintosh to play with, from one of my brother’s friends. It’s a PowerComputing PowerCenter Pro 210.

Here’s the specs (from dmesg):

cpu0 at mainbus0: 750 (Revision 3.0), ID 0 (primary)
cpu0: HID0 8090c0a4<emcp ,DOZE,DPM,ICE,DCE,SGE,BTIC,BHT>
cpu0: 273.69 MHz L2 cache present but not enabled 

It’s got 256MB of RAM, and 4 (yes 4) hard disks, of varying sizes up to 9GB. Not a bad little machine. Definitely fun to play with.

Last time I was working on this machine, I spent a week trying to get Gentoo Linux to boot, but I was almost completely unsuccessful. Today, after working with TONS of floppies (trying to find 2 that were not corrupt AND would read in the system’s floppy drive), I have succeeded in booting NetBSD, and getting it installed onto the hard disk.

NetBSD was actually very easy to get working, their documentation was spot on, and their boot floppies worked without a hitch. Very, very impressive in my book, especially for a machine so old and hard to boot. 🙂

So, for the next few days I’ll probably be working on NetBSD, learning how it works. It’s already noticeably different from Linux, which I’m very used to.

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