On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Colin Wood wrote:

> virtual chaos wrote:
> > 
> > hi i just was wondering if netbsd will run on a performa 631cd because 
> 
> Probably not, at least not at the moment, anyway.  There are a few
> problems with the 63x Macs....

That's putting it mildly...

[snip]

> Don't bother partitioning your harddrive (yes, you might lose data that's
> already on there if you don't do it right).  The internal IDE drives on
> some Macs is _not_ supported by NetBSD/mac68k.  Perhaps someone with one
> of these machines will want to try their hand at adding such support
> (although I don't know of anyone working on it at the moment).
> 
> There are 2 other possible problems with the 631CD.  It may have a 68LC040
> processor (I don't know for sure), but this would mean that it might tend
> to give a lot of illegal instruction errors when you try to run it.  The
> other possible problem is that the ADB (keyboard and mouse) may not be
> fully supported right at the moment.  Someone else on the list does have
> one of these machines, tho, because I know that I've heard of someone
> trying to boot on one.
> 
> If you are lucky, it may be all you need to do is get an external SCSI
> drive and put NetBSD on it.  Hopefully, someone else on the list will add
> a little bit more info on this (and I'd be interested in knowing how
> NetBSD-current works on the 630-series Macs since I need to update the
> machine-status doc by the time 1.3 comes out).

The major problem with the 63x (and the 640) is the 68LC040 processor.  
The IDE is the next problem, and I'm not sure about the ADB.  I have a 
640 (a 63x with a multiple personality problem...) that I tried to 
install NetBSD on.  I gave up trying when it refused to recognize my 
drive.  (Having just spent $$ on a new 2Gig IDE HD, I was certainly not 
going to shell out more $$ to get a SCSI just to run NetBSD on...)
	I'm trying to get my hands on a larger drive to replace the 80M SCSI 
in my IIci/MacBSD box(hannibal), and I might try it out on my 640 before 
I set it up on hannibal, if I can get a 68040 (BTW, does anybody know if 
this will work?  I've read the links at www.macbsd.com (thanks, puma!) 
but I'd love to know if anybody actually has tried it, or heard of such, 
or thinks they know why it might/might not work...) to solve the LC040 
problems.  I might even ignore them, if that's possible (not sure what 
the problems entail, actually) just to try out the ADB, to see if that's 
working.
	(The preceding paragraph is an indication that I should sleep more 
often than once every 36 hours.)  Basically, I offer to try out NetBSD on 
a 640, but you'll have to give me 1) some time to get a spare SCSI HD, 
and 2) some clue as to how to tell LC040 errors from DOS card errors, or 
other nasty things...
	In the meantime, I might recommend that anybody thinking about 
installing NetBSD on a 63x/640 either have lots of technical expertise 
and spare time, or consider waiting for a while, until some sort of 
fix/workaround is found for the list of problems with these machines...

	-Seth Miller