There is finally for Performa 5200 a working Linux
kernel
2.4.6pre3, made by Takashi Oe and his team for
NuBus-PowerPC-hardware.
I have recently moved to Debian Woody, GNU/Linux 3 (latest
stabile release).
I used earlier about eight months LinuxPPC Q4
successfully. During the Easter week of 2002 an ethernet card (Farallon) was added to my Mac
and the RAM was increased up to 64 MB (max. extension).
Hardware
Performa 5200 (nubus PPC 603e)
- processor NuBus 603e 75 MHz
- 64 MB RAM
- 15 GB IDE-HD
- ADSL-modem TeleWell TW-EA701
- Ethernet Farallon PN592a-TP
Changing to Debian Linux
- Still the same kernel as with LinuxPPC Q4
- First installation was done from Debian Potato CD-roms containing all the necessary
binaries
- This was next upgraded to Woody (still at time testing release)
with CD-roms
- Fine tuning (modem, mouse, X, networking etc.) was made manually
The test kernel by Takashi Oe for NuBus-PPC
does work very well also with Debian.
Debian Woody is clearly
more stabile than LinuxPPC. Debian has never crashed even while using Mozilla
Gecko 1.0 browser.
Tuning of Debian has required much manual changes.
Many points which were automatically installed with LinuxPPC, had to be made thru editing
several files of Debian.
Some of the solved problems during the first installation:
- some lines of Apache conf-file causing syntax erros were commented
off
- mouse device had to be defined manually
- modem device had to be set manually
device.
- ppp settings were normally given and the resulting pon script could
dial up and connect. However, login was not possible until I removed the
default route.
X required much trials and editing of
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4, until it was going up.
That was a fun coincidence that I got my ADSL-connection installed just as I had first time ppp working correctly.
ADSL needs first
pump which reads IP-address.
apt-get pump
With Google I found a short instruction in German at the site
Linux fuer
alle, explaining how to make ADSL-connection to work
on Linux. It's simple: Edit
file /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
....
That's it!
Restart network with command /etc/init.d/networking restart
X is launched from shell with command startx.
In Debian X may be started by a normal user too.
X alone is not enough. There has to be kind of window manager too. At the moment, I am using IceWM.
It does not waste the limited resources.
I used at first Mozilla browser - however, it is rather heavy while used in an older computer,
but it seems to render bigger tables much quicker then for instance NS4.7 or iCab in Mac OS.
I am using Opera 6.1 which is about as quick as promised by advertising.
Even multitude of windows may be opened without freezing the browser.
Nothing is really perfect
The first Ethernet card was good for Linux but very bad on Mac OS.
It has caused system freezing and crash while being a few hours on-line during every session.
I had to change it to another Ethernet card which was perfect on Mac. However, the new card could not be used in Linux atall as
it was not even detected by the system.
The new card is Farallon
YPN598-TP, EtherMac LC CS Card - TP10BaseT for LC comm slot.
I put later the first card in, thus I can use it in Linux.
I have to switch the modem cable from one card to other when I change OS.
The national characters are not available in shell console.
In fact, all keymaps are missing except
the basic keymap "US". I could set the national keys on X, but
the special characters @ ja ~ are missing with national setting.
Disket-drive does not work in Linux. So, I have to use the special Mac OS partition to exchange data
between Mac OS and Linux. That partition is rather small, 20 MB only.
I have not even tried yet printing on HP870 Deskjet.
Useful links
