webhat's Journal: Performa 475

Yesterday a friend of mine found 2 Performa 475 while cleaning out his storage space, knowing I like really high electricity bills he gave them to me to play with. I quickly discovered that neither of them have network capability, unless you count serial/modem. So I will probably hook them into my internal POTS for network access.

I do have one slight hurdle, neither have a CDROM drive. And as I want to put linux on them this might be a problem as I don't have a SCSI CDROM drive. I thought it should be possible to install the required MacOS9 bootloader from floppy and then install a ppc linux base system from a x86 machine. I know it should work, I just wonder how much trouble it would be cross installing the machine.

• Apple Specifications Proforma 475

Good luck with that!

[BandwidthHog]

Those machines are pre-PPC. Not only are they 68040 chips, they’re 68LC040 chips, meaning they lack an FPU and PMMU. For obvious reasons I haven’t kept up with what operating systems will run on various 680x0 machines, but I think your best bet would be finding the right BSD to run on whatever 68030 machines you can trade those for. (Don’t take that as gospel, only as a starting point. You might have more options than I realize.)