OpenMac Operational Status
Thank you for your interest in free Unix on the PowerMacintosh.
You might be interested in the information available one level up
on the
OpenMac project.
The current state of the project will, of course, progress, but any
major developments will be contained herein. Do not expect daily
updates.
The status...
You may get information on these projects by following the links
on the above OpenMac page.
- FreeBSD
- To the best of my knowledge, there is not yet any work on a
PowerMacintosh version of FreeBSD. There is some work being
done on a Motorola PowerStack ("Ultra" motherboard), but I
don't know how that's progressing.
- Linux on Mach
- Apple and the OSF have worked together to provide a Linux server
running on a Mach microkernel on Apple PowerMac hardware.
Initially, this is just for the first generation PowerMacs,
but will eventually support the PCI-based systems. For more
info, see
Apple's web pages.
- Linux
- There is a nice Linux/ppc
port that is quite functional on a range of PCI-based PowerMacs.
- NetBSD and OpenBSD
- I lump these together as they're still quite similar. Work is
proceeding slowly here for various reasons.
I'm primarily interested in the BSDs, but I want to see all of the above
systems (and more) flourish. I will be looking for testers and users
on the Open/NetBSD front when I get something running. I will announce
something on the NetBSD newsgroups and probably the linux-ppc, NetBSD,
and OpenBSD mailing lists when that time comes. This will also be
updated.
If you would like to donate hardware, please let me know. I currently
don't plan to work on the NuBus PowerMacs unless I get at least a machine
out of it. ;-)
For the curious, I am currently cross-compiling under NetBSD/mac68k on
an unaccelerated Mac IIcx. It's slow.
briggs@macbsd.com