Sorry, confused that. He built it on Linux 0.13 or something like that; Minix-vmd has ACK that works fine. On 386BSD 0.0 even GCC 1.39 was usable ;-)

But we're getting off-topic slowly... though that's probably normal.

Needless to say that, even *if* there's an exploit for say, the webserver, out there: nobody's going to write shellcode for m68k.

For the same reason, Miod Vallat of OpenBSD fame runs his website on a VAX, and the BSI is said to still use BS/2000 somewhere. Even if not unbreakable, nobody's going to be able to use it ;-) At least not your average 08/15 skriptkiddie.

Ah, thanks for the additional background. Yes, a pointer to the problems would probably be appreciated by the ARAnyM developers.

The d-i will not work right now, not with the normal mirrors at least, due to debootstrap being unable to cope with needing to pull packages from *two* distributions (unstable and unreleased), we think. We're working on it.

https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Installing in the meantime has an ext2fs image you can use / boot into, and kernels.

I've asked Atari-Frosch to power on the machine and then comment here, so we will have boot messages.

Thanks for the help!

Mhm. Can the kernel image be changed, like with config(8) -ef /bsd on MirBSD/OpenBSD, to not do that?

I think something in /etc/rc drops me to single user when INSECURE is set, but itâ(TM)s been quite an amount of months, so I do not remember precisely.

Cool, thanks!

GCC 1.42 is fine (we run that on BSDi BSD/OS 3.1 as well, and RT compiled it on Minix-vmd since the shipped GCC 1.40 was broken); mksh is amazingly portable.

Do come over to the channel though ;) We've got a few tricks.

IIRC, that wasn't it: it did find the root filesystem but was hardcoded to single user and securelevel -1 (I should note that this is the same kernel as was used for the installation).

But thanks for the offer anyway ;-)

Since I can't find an eMail in the archives, I assume I only asked in IRC :( but I did the installation attempt at a conference, so...

Ask Atari-Frosch in #atari-home on OFTC for details, it's her computer, and she can power it on and look. (I think Linux failed due to too few ST-RAM for the kernel to fit. It's rather fat nowadays...)

I'm not good with details on Amiga, but I think the procedure is:

You boot some sort of Kickstart/Workbench, then run an AmigaOS program which is the Linux bootloader and pass it the kernel and, if needed, the initrd from the AmigaOS filesystem, it will load them and make them usable, then jump into Linux. From then onwards, that one will be the OS in charge, making ext4 available etc.

Sadly, no kexec yet. Having to copy out the kernel instead of being able to load it directly from ext4 (or whatever you choose) would be cool.

AFAIHH some of the emulation projects have made available Free (as in Freedom) ROMs for TOS (EmuTOS) and Kickstart, which contain enough code to run this without needing the proprietary Amiga stuff. But, like I said, I'm nowhere near knowledgeable about this part of those architectures, plus I mostly worked on (emulated and a few real) Ataris, not Amigas, while doing this. (And even there, I did as few as possible on the "native" side.)

Right, but I recently tried to install NetBSD/atari on AtariFrosch's box, and the installer died on itself. I, having BSD experience, managed to still install it by manually untarring the sets, running MAKEDEV, etc. but the kernel seems to have hardcoded booting into securelevel -1 and single user, so the system doesn't come up afterwards without some manual effort on each boot.

No NetBSD® person I asked could help, and the mailing list was dead as well.

Granted, the software works, but it's less refined. (That being said, while Wouter built a debian-installer image, nobody has tested it yet, and installing sid is always chancy due to its moving nature. But debootstrap, edit fstab, get a kernel and boot into it works.)

By the way, if you get AMIX running and with an ANSI C compiler, join the IRC channel #!/bin/mksh (yes, that's really its name) on Freenode, so we can port mksh to it ;-)

If you are interested, that is.

cbmuser already issued an Intent To Package FS-UAE to Debian, which makes use of WinUAE's "accurate emulation".

I believe that you should be able to use wouter's d-i build from http://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/ to install an m68k system from unstable (with the usual caveats, i.e. installing or debootstrapping unstable does not always work). Note that the build is still "fresh" and nobody has tested it yet, so a failure would not mean an emulation problem.

Once FS-UAE is in Debian, I'll likely publish a disc image for starters like https://wiki.debian.org/Aranym/Quick for the emulated Atari. (Today, I'll make updated .tar.gz archives of a debootstrap result, which helps people already running etch-m68k or sarge (the image you linked is Debian 3.1 = sarge) to quickly install a fresh system, or at least the user space part.)

Watch the debian-68k@lists.d.o mailing list, and/or the Debian Wiki, for progress.

Last time I looked, qemu-system-m68k lacked MMU support.
Someone recently said qemu-user-m68k was usable, but that does syscall level translation (I wonder what they do about the TLS and atomic-cmpxchg syscalls that are recent-m68k specific) and thus doesn't suffice.

Finding bugs in Debian, gcc, eglibc, the Linux kernel, by running it on minority systems is a decent outcome of this, Iâ(TM)d say.

The purpose of having bragging rights that mksh works on all platforms, no matter what obscure, is personal, so you canâ(TM)t measure relevance anyway. Iâ(TM)ve even done DEC ULTRIX and Haiku successfully. Oh, and Plan 9â¦

Besides, it was a nice project to learn about how Debian works ;-)

You should learn to think outside of the box. What makes you think reviving ancient hardware ever was the purpose?

Besides this, I think the other replies already said everything needed.

Actually, I got KDE 4.8 working (to prove my patches against gcc-4.6 and qt4-x11 were correct). As long as you don't start KDEPIM (Kontact), it's actually decent fast (in tightvncserver):

http://oi47.tinypic.com/2058vue.jpg

Funnily enough, a sole GTK+ application (xchat) in a light-weight window manager (IceWM, otherwise much faster than KDE) was slower.

Of course, once I started Kontact, all bets were off, but then, whenever I do that on the company desktop at work (where we're forced to use it for Groupware - the calendar you see is my actual account at work, sans a few sensitive information) even a modern x86 machine gets slow ;)

The motto in the IRC channel (#debian-68k on OFTC) was actually "Go away Santa. We're hacking code."