Hi,
I have a Quadra 605 w/ a 680LC040 and I would klike to give NetBSD a shot 
on it...=)

Where can Iget this 'Software FPE'?

Chris

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, John Burg wrote:

> At 9:51 AM -0500 1/7/98, Andy Sinesio wrote:
> >I have a Centris 610 that I would like to put NetBSD on (it's becoming
> >quite useless as a Mac OS box) and I know there are some issues with teh
> >68LC040 chip inside.  It does have 24 megs of RAM and a 500 meg hard
> >disk, so I assume it could make a decent unix machine if I could get the
> >processor to work correctly.  How much would it cost to upgrade it to a
> >full 68040 if that is the only answer?
> >
> 
> I am using NetBSD 1.3 on another 68LC040 machine-- a Performa 630 (36 MB
> RAM). I'm running it off of a Zip drive (no swap). My machine has not been
> upgraded-- it is using only the software FPE. Despite its status as an
> unsupported machine, I have found it rather usable. Sure, I get
> segmentation faults and illegal instruction errors fairly frequently. But
> this has not made the machine unusable; they are only an annoyance. I am
> able to run X-Windows, various games, PPP, Lynx, etc. (I don't have enough
> disk space to try the compiler package.)
> The worst thing I have encountered is that I sometimes have to type
> "startx" 15 or 20 times before X successfully starts up. But once it starts
> running, it is fairly cooperative. I have had uptimes lasting a couple days
> (having a swap partition would lengthen this).
> 
> So if you can put up with frequent segmentation faults, you might be able
> to get by without upgrading your machine until the NetBSD's FPE is fixed.
> 
> Speaking of the FPE... does anyone know the current status of that project?
> 
> John Burg
> 
> 
>