[rescue] Mac Appliance

[Brian Hechinger]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 11:43:34AM -0400, joshua d boyd wrote:
> I'm looking at a pretty loaded LCIII for next to nothing, and due to how

mmmmm LC III  nice little box, just got an LC II today along with a bunch of
5200 series boxes and various others (about 30 total) hmmmmm.  these things
are SLOW (MacOS 7.6.1)  603/PPC or something like that.  *brain melting*

> small it is, I'm thinking Server appliance.  Uh, that then brings to mind,
> anyone know how happy old macs are about being run headless?  To run

it should be doable, don't know if you can get a serial console or not though.

> NetBSD on a Mac 68k, you have to do something like loadlin, except it is a
> Mac instead of DOS program, and you are loading NetBSD, not Linux.  But,
> apparently, you can't just boot straight to NetBSD.  But, you probably
> could have the System 7 startup sequence boot NetBSD, couldn't you?

nobody wants to be bothered to write a bootloader/whatever that gets called
from the ROM, small partition for MacOS just to get NetBSD going.  and yes, you
can make it automatically do that.  it's ugly, but it works.

> Oh well, just a thought.  Didn't know if maybe anyone had tried it.

i haven't messed with BSD on the 68k macs in a couple years, so i'm a bit rusty
(used to run MacBSD on a IIx before it got merged into NetBSD)

> Actually, it seems someone did try it.  Just short pins 4 and 11. 

cool.

> Hmm, now, do I really want yet another box...

i just got 30 old macs today.  so what so you think my answer to that question
will be??  :)

-brian