performa 5200

Draiocht · 09-25-2005, 04:57 PM

Hi all,

Now call me sad if you will but I get a churny feeling when I see a computer that has done good service in the past being consigned to a skip. Hence I wound up rescuing this old Macintosh Performa 5200 Power PC from just such a fate. Now I haven't a clue what I'm going to do with it or use it for just yet, but out of curiosity I was just wondering if there's a version of LINUX that I could get running on it.

Any ideas anyone?

Regards

Draiocht

logosys · 09-25-2005, 05:23 PM

Yep. Give Fedora Core a try. You just want to make sure you download the PPC kernel. When you install, you're going to have limited options giving the "vintage" of the particular computer, but I have faith that it shouldn't have too much of a problem.

SteveK1979 · 09-25-2005, 05:36 PM

Hi,

I think yellow dog linux also might just about run on this hardware. I was about to say 'there's also NetBSD' but I was shocked to find that this particular model of performa isn't supported!

Cheers,

Steve

spooon · 09-25-2005, 06:18 PM

Performa 5200 is a NuBus machine (it's not even OldWorld PCI). The regular Linux PPC kernel does not support NuBus. You must either use MkLinux, which is like Linux that runs on top of the Mach kernel; or use the experimental Linux NuBus kernel. Also, you must dual-boot with MacOS and have a bootloader that runs from MacOS startup.

P.S. Debian seems to work well on old Macs (but I haven't tried one this old).

Edit: Yellow Dog too. The Linux NuBus kernel doesn't look too bad and has several installation guides.

Draiocht · 09-25-2005, 07:21 PM

Thanks everyone,

I'll get experimenting on the poor unsuspecting creature and get back with the results.

Regards

Draiocht

PaganHippie · 09-25-2005, 09:42 PM

Let us know how it works out for you. I have a Powermac 5200 (the U.S. education version for the Performa 5200) that I'd also love to run Linux on, but I was informed that it was unsupported due to its 'split bus' and lack of DMA support. It does run MacOS 9.1, but s-l-o-w-l-y....

Draiocht · 09-26-2005, 06:56 PM

I have a few other things that I am working on at the moment so it may be a couple of days before I get round to this , but I'll definitely be back to let you know how things work out.

regards,

Draiocht