bepatient wrote:

Hmm... seems like one more has come out since I debated bringing a 7200 in house: Monolithic Linux

The referenced Web page is not about any PowerPC Linux distribution by that name, but rather about the concept of running on PowerMacs the monolithic kernel ported to PPC by my friend Paul Mackerras, instead of the mkLinux kernel.

That page is old and a bit out of date: Among other things, its uses the obsolescent term "linux-pmac" (meaning the monolithic kernel version), and the list of distributions near the end is way out of date. Where they say "Linux/PowerPC", that's an antique name for the LinuxPPC distribution, which is now defunct. I have a more-current distributions list here: [link|http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#powermaclinux|http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#powermaclinux]

By the way, I have Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 running on a 7200. (v. 2.3 is available.) It'll never be a speed demon, but it works.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

BePatient wrote:

I may end up with one of these machines one day.

Yr. welcome. By coincidence, a friend brought over a 7200 of his own, today. We started by putting Debian-stable ("woody"/3.0) on it, and then upgrading it to Debian-testing ("sarge"). The motherboard's built-in video chipset is pretty abysmal: FYI, it's a "Platinum" chipset, which came from the factory with either 1MB (most often) or 2MB VRAM, upgradeable to 4MB. We were able to get 800x600 at 16bpp. Use the framebuffer video driver. If you can justify the expense, adding a video card (e.g. ATI) would be a major win.

The ADB keyboard and mouse get addressed as USB devices(!). The SCSI chipset is Advansys. Ethernet is the old MACE chipset.

Don't expect much. These puppies were mostly 90 MHz PPC 601 chips, and I believe some early ones were 75 MHz.

My friend's has 96MB system RAM, which is enough to get by: We put Window Maker, Blackbox, Sawfish, and Icewm on it, with Window Maker as the default.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com