Subject: Re: problem w/ NetBSD on a Powerbook Duo 230
To: None <nigel@ind.tansu.com.au>
From: Christopher Pinon <pinon@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 10/26/1998 18:44:50
Thanks, Nigel, for this reference.  I'll take a closer look at Daishi's
site and then decide whether I want to try to install the older kernel.

After a fairly thorough look at the various free Unixes (e.g., NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Linux/m68k) for 68k Macs, I've come to the rather sad conclusion
that the Duos are the "lost children" of the Mac family, as far as support
by the official kernels is concerned.  Few people seem to have Duos, fewer
still seem to want to run a Unix-like system on them.  In addition, Duo
hardware seems to pose tricky problems for developers (or so I understand).

Nevertheless, I should emphasize that I'm very impressed at the range of
Macs that NetBSD does support (the NetBSD/m68k project seems to be years
ahead of the Linux/m68k project in this respect, for example).  If I ever
come into possession of a more "standard" 68k Mac, I will certainly be back.

Ch. Pinon

>	Hi Christopher. Basically, the kernel you are booting with is
>not compatible with Duos. The only kernel that I have found that does
>is an old 1.2-based one which can be found here:
>
>http://www.axlight.com/people/daishi/macbsd/netbsd-e.html
>
>1) I think you need to install an older set of packages on your Zip
>   disk. The 1.3.2 binaries will not run with this 1.2 based kernel
>
>2) The author of this kernel had to make some changes to the VIA
>   register and serial port mapping code. I also think that there
>   are some memory mapping issues that have yet to be resolved on
>   the Duos, but haven't had time to investigate yet.
>
>3) As far as I know, none of these changes have ever been applied to
>   the current kernels