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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

From http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx

> Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development.

>Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware.

Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing?

edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU

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I believe that Mac OS X only ran on “New World ROM” machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_ROM

(Could be wrong about that—that was a long time ago.)

Early versions of OS X did run on Old World Macs, I remember running it on my 7500. I think the limiting factor was the Mac had to have Open Firmware, which started with the PCI Macs.

https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...

Afaik MacOS X didn't boot on old world PPC machines with NuBus slots, but 10.2.x can be installed on a PowerMac 9500 with a G3 upgrade and with a 32MB PCI Radeon GPU the UI was even usable. It helped that the box was also upgraded with >800MB RAM spread over 12 DIMMs as well as two 10kRPM U160 disks in HW RAID1. Still the slow 50-60MHz PPC60x bus was beyond painful.

I think it would be possible, but you'd likely need to drop into the open firmware and type in a magic incantation to make the bootloader think it was a supported system (don't ask me to remember exactly what that might be. It was a looong time ago, but I did get both PPC OS X and Darwin to run on an unsupported mac clone that had an upgraded cpu. I remember submitting a posting to resexcellence about it!)

OS X (10.0 - 10.3) worked out of the box on my iMac G3. It was pretty sluggish until 10.3 came out, but I didn't need to do anything tricky like firmware upgrades to get it running.

The 6100 does not use a conventional PCI bus.

IIRC a big problem was the CPU. PowerMacs with 603s or 604s were "supported" by XPostFacto, but not the 601, which is why the 7200 could not boot OS X despite not using NuBus. The NuBus Macs also did not use OpenFirmware, contrary to all PCI (and AGP) PowerMacs.

Indeed these systems had NuBus, which was a holdover from the earlier 68k MacII and Quadra machines.

> The basic requirement for Mac OS X to ever work on a machine is that it have a PowerPC processor, a PCI bus, and Open Firmware. So the earliest PowerPC computers from Apple (e.g. the 6100, 7100, and 8100) are not likely to ever work with Mac OS X.

Source: https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...

No OS X, but you can run the Mach 3/osfmk-based MkLinux. My 6100 was one if the first in Europe to run it and served as ftp server to distribute MkLinux. Must have been 1996 or 97, I think…

I used Mklinux on a powermac 8100 for 5 years has my home distant ssh and cli box.

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