Older PPC machines...

[Hawker, Daniel]

Hi All,

My first post, so please be nice :)

Have a few old Macs in the garage that I use for various tasks (door
stop, DNS, etc), presently running Linux PPC (Yellow Dog Linux 4) or Mac
OS9 (dual booting on one). This was admittedly a bit of a pain to
install (these older machines need a slightly different kernel to allow
for certain hardware) and I had to scour the web for info to get them
going.

I'd like to install FreeBSD on one of these machines, more as a project
than as a real reason to accomplish anything and wondered if these are
at all compatible.

As mentioned its only really an experiment, I have FreeBSD running on a
Sony Vaio Picturebook for a web development and general messing about
machine, so if it's a no-go I'll leave it on Linux, but I'd prefer to
run FreeBSD if at all possible.

I have noticed that there is a PPC version of NetBSD available, so I
guess I could use that if need be, however am more familiar with
FreeBSD.

If these older machines are unsupported (and there is a plan for them to
be supported) I'd be willing to do some testing of some sorts. The
hardware I have is below.

Thanks

Dan

--

PowerMac 7600/132 with 192MB RAM
PowerMac 9500/180MP with 384MB RAM (dual processor board, yes actually
has 2 processors too)
(both of these are pure SCSI machines, ie have SCSI hard disks and
CDROMs, no IDE at all, which makes getting largeish hard disks either
hard or impossible).

Random set of hardware, including...
ADB mice/keyboards
Iomega Zip & Jaz drives (SCSI)
Linotype Jade2 Scanner (SCSI)
A number of external SCSI hard disks
PCI Ethernet card (Kingston EtheRX KNE100TX)
PCI USB card (Belkin IIRC)
PCI SCSI card (Adaptec AHA-2940U) - not presently doing anything apart
from being plugged in and powered up.
AppleVision 1710 monitors

(some other stuff in a box buried under loads of general rubbish)