I have recently become the owner of some old Mac machines. I'm not a Mac person myself, but I'm also not one to waste some old hardware. I was wondering if it would be possible to get Slackware running on these things? I came across the Slackintosh Linux Project but one of the requirements is a "New World" ROM, which I have confirmed none of mine are. To be specific, I have in my possession:

• PowerCenter Pro 210
• Power Mac 4400/200 (PC Compatible)
• Power Mac 7600/132
• Macintosh Performa 6116CD (two of these)
• Power Mac 6100/60AV

How hard would it be to get Slack running on any of these? And, more importantly, would it be worth it? My plan is to try to get them running on my home network so I can play with various networking things like Web serving.
Would this simply be a matter of compiling all the Slack sources on this architecture, or is it more difficult than that?

Opinions are welcome.

The first three you have are Old World PCI Macs, and the last two are Nubus Macs.

There are two bootloaders to choose from for Old World PCI Macs:
* quik - which boots directly from Open Firmware, but requires you to tweak Open Firmware settings in various ways (see here and here)
* BootX - which boots from a Classic Mac OS system; so it requires to you set aside a separate partition for a minimal MacOS system, but it doesn't require messing with OF

For Nubus Macs, you need to use the Nubus Linux kernel; this also requires you to set aside a MacOS system.

Debian and old versions of Yellow Dog tended to work well on old world Macs; though Slackware can probably work too.

Thanks for those links, I'll look into those.

I just got into the ppc world myself so I'm not overly knowledgeable on the subject. You might want to look into why Slackintosh requires a new world box. It could be that just the installer/yaboot portion of the bootable CD won't work with old world systems. If that's the case, you might be able to still get Slackintosh on there with minimal hacking. I tried it and honestly didn't get that "slackware vibe" from it. I had trouble compiling some things and noticed some really shoddy things about a few packages... I guess this is why Pat doesn't officially endorse it.

Another option, if you have lots of free time, is to do as you hinted and compile the sources yourself. In fact, I just got done doing this on my G3 pizmo. Granted, it's a new world powerbook but GCC is GCC in that regard and offhand, I see no reason why you couldn't do an LFS or preferably DIY approach on your old world box. Be prepared to do lots of waiting as your old processor tries to compile glibc and gcc... :-) The gcc tests on my 500mhz G3 took 10 hours to complete. I've uploaded my results to the gcc test result mailing list if your interested in a comparison. Also check the DIY mailing list as I'll soon be posting a modified reference build for PPC.... We'll see what Greg has to say about it.

More specifically, what I did was follow DIY using my own build scripts, use pkgtools for the package manager and use a mish/mash combination of the Sysvinit boot scripts from LFS and Slackware scripts (modified for evaluate_retval). How far you want to go on getting it closer to Slackware is entirely up to you. A self compiled system (following DIY) on any arch using pkgtools is just as stable as slackware. No kidding. DIY cranks out a really nice base system and there is no better package manager than pkgtools... I'm currently on 167 packages built thus far and the ONLY one that gave me a problem was nss-3.11. That and unzip but unzip was trivial. Anyway...

Good luck. Here are some reference links. I have a feeling the yaboot bootloader will be your bigest hurdle.

http://www.diy-linux.org/x86-reference-build/
http://www.diy-linux.org/pipermail/diy-linux-dev/
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresult.../msg00301.html
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/

Awesome, more links! Thanks for those, I will need to devote some time to tackling this...

As far as DIY et al, I don't think I'm quite ready to build my own distro from the ground up. This is why I was looking for information on getting Slack to work. Minimal hacking I can deal with, I will look into Slackintosh a little more and see if I can ascertain the amount of incompatibility with Old World.

It seems weird there isn't any official support for PPC in Slackware, as I've noticed several other distros that advertise that support right off the bat. Oh well, looks like a good time to get my hands dirty and learn something, eh?

yea, you might try downloading debian ppc and use their install CD as a live cd. copy the slacintosh cd to the hard drive and try chrooting into it. Run the installer from there or something to that effect. I'm going on the assumption that yaboot is what's going to crap out on you when you try to bootup the slackintosh CD.