MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150 | Hacker News Reader

MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

oldvcr.blogspot.com

107 pointsgoldenskye23 comments

My first desktop linux box was a PowerMac 8100/80 with MkLinux, probably sometime in 1996. At launch it didn't have support for multi-button mice, which made X11 kind of hard to use (center-button was the only way to paste text in many cases back then), as Apple only shipped a one button mouse by default so that was all that was supported.

As an impertinent high schooler, I emailed Logitech asking for one of their 3 button ADB trackballs, saying I was going to add 3 button support to MkLinux. They actually replied and sent me one. I managed to come up with some code that kind of worked, and sent off a patch, but by that time I think someone else fixed the multibutton mouse issue before me.

Good times back then. It was such a step up in terms of multitasking, and a step back in terms of UI consistency from classic MacOS.

When I went off to university a year later, Apple wasn't doing so hot so, so I built myself a Pentium Pro machine. Prices on those parts went through the floor as the Pentium II had come out, and Linux was all 32 bit so no 16 bit perf issues the PPro was known for. Dual CPU board (single CPU at first) and as another processor and memory upgrades getting cheaper it was a nice machine through all of college.

Then after graduation I got a job after MacOS X came out, and jumped back to Apple products as they were the only game for unix on a laptop with power management that didn't suck in the early 2000's.

Good times.

Good times indeed. Similar to you, my first Linux install was MkLinux on a PowerMac 7100. And I had completely forgotten about the mouse button issue until you mentioned it. I vaguely recall somehow attaching a 3-button PC serial mouse and writing some code to make all the buttons work.

Power management still sucks on Linux AND windows for that matter. Ridiculous how every other UX is just left to rot, it’s like no one else even tries besides Apple.

Some teenagers saved up money for a car. I saved up money for a PowerMac 7100. It cost me $3k, with a solid student discount.

I used it throughout college and beyond. I upgraded the RAM, the L2 cache. I even added one of the Sonnet G3 cards the article shows.

During its latter years, it only ran MkLinux.

Similar story here, but I must have been slightly behind cuz I had a 7200.

Was so stoked when MkLinux came out but quickly took sides in the micro-mono-kernel wars when ppclinux came out, must have been '95 or '96. I was probably the first person to boot the monokernel on a 7200, (iirc Mackerras had a 9k series), thus unlocking the challenge of reverse engineering the video hardware, and an early career in embedded sw.

This was the era when there were mac clones, somehow I or someone involved (Jeff Carr probably) got one and I got it housed in the wisconsin cs labs, doleing out accounts to random people who wanted to build packages on PPC. One of whom was Mark Abene. Truly different times, when a notorious hacker would call you up on the phone and ask for an account on your machine and "sure dude just don't break anything".

In the spirit of historical dives, Wisc still keeps my old fanpage up - the final comment there that it hasn't been updated since '98 is accurate!

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~tesch/linux_info/

> We got the musical sting! <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui1ygMZWdKE> (These Power Macs do not make a Mac "bong.")

I love this one (my PowerMac 7100 back in the day had the same) because it's ‘totally not A Hard Day's Night’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-awuNzko4

> This particular machine, codenamed "Zephyr," had an arresting crimson prototype board complete with populated debug header, additional test points and a silkscreened train logo. <https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/8pcwux/oddbal...>

Not just any train; that's the California Zephyr! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Zephyr_(1949%E2%80%...

My photo of the same EMD FP7 locomotive <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pacific_805-A> as the Wikipedia header image, at the Western Pacific RR Museum in Portola California: https://i.ibb.co/Kzzs3gT4/WP-805A.jpg (taken in 2022 with Olympus PEN-F + Sigma 56mm prime)

At an early start up I worked for, we had a bunch of PowerPC Mac pizza boxes running System 7. The experience was terrible, they crashed or locked up constantly.

I eventually took a few of them and installed MkLinux and they were rock-solid workhorses for years after, doing things like light file serving, Usenet proxy and a firewall.

I worked at an early ISP with a web development department. A couple of the guys had Macs with System 7.x. The things would lock up or crash on a daily basis and require near daily reboots. Some of that early software, especially Netscape Navigator, was incredibly unstable. Fortunately, we had Sun Sparc and SGI boxes for the servers.

Same for Win95 etc. In the 90s there was still a divergence between those who could afford expensive hardware to run a modern OS, and those who had to suffer with the toy version.

On more than one occasion (after constant crashing), I remember wanting to smash the the keyboard thru the monitor, like the famous .gif of old. The fury was real, haha.

Win95 technically had better memory protection than classic Mac OS, but that didn't matter much when you ran something that crashed the whole system.

For new "32 bit" software, but the bulk was the old 16-bit/VXDs etc for quite a while.

> require near daily reboots.

This is true, but the thing is that was normal then.

It was the stuff of jokes:

"You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day."

Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse.

Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read:

"I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0."

DOS didn't so much because it didn't multitask. Netware didn't because all it did was serve files. But in the 1980s, if a computer could run multiple apps at once, it crashed all the damned time.

Then came OS/2 2 which was a lot more solid -- not very at all by 21st century standards but visibly better -- and it was a revelation. You could run a multitasking GUI OS on your cheapo built-from-bits COTS PC and it just ran for days on end, using mainstream off-the-shelf software. And it was always under massive load, because in 1992 a decent PC was a 386 with 4MB of RAM, VGA, and an IDE hard disk... but OS/2 2 stayed stable and responsive under massive load.

But it didn't last.

In 1993 along came Windows NT. It was even more bulletproof (because it was even more restrictive on drivers and things at first), and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level -- but it did all that, even more stably, and it also included networking as standard, and TCP/IP as standard, and dial-up TCP as standard.

That was the first machine I had a routed connection to the Internet on. I had my own dial-up email account, and work CI$ account, but I could dial into CI$ from NT 3.1 and ping the internet and it worked. Amazing. I never tried this new World Wide Web thing because it sounded like a toy, but I had email and USENET and FTP and CI$ all at the same time and it just worked. It was amazing. And it was on my work LAN and talking to servers at the same time.

OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 couldn't do that without even more expensive add-ons. OS/2 3.0 made it an expensive premium edition, "Warp Connect".

NT had it in the box.

It was the future.

Yes, it was normal, for sure. I had an Amiga and it was also bad. Visits to the Guru ("Guru Meditation Error", equivalent of Windows UAEs) were common.

Around 1994, I moved to Linux and later Solaris, where crashes were rare.

I didn't get an Amiga until a decade after their peak but yes, even I knew about guru meditations. :-)

And bombs on the ST. Macs got a hardware button to drop into a debugger and you could try to continue, but it rarely worked.

When a Mac app died, a message told you that the OS had become unstable and it might crash soon and you should save your work in all other programs and reboot as soon as possible.

Since Mac OS X fixed that, the message was specifically and carefully reworded, to say that an app had died and your OS and all other apps were unaffected and there was no need to reboot. Few noticed this but it was clever and funny.

> [...] and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level [...].

Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time (c't, 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.

Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Server 3.51 on it.

Yes, it worked. As a server, it was perfectly usable and rock solid. I used it for years and it never ever crashed.

But I never logged into the console. NT 3.x ran on a 386 but you would not want to use it as a desktop computer.

16697 word count, higher than Steve Yegge or Kalzumeus! Printed in a 6”x9” book, it would be 66 pages, without images.

As someone that followed this back then via whatever articles would come up in the press, it is a very interesting deep dive, and yet another proof how Apple never got big enterprise customers, nowadays servers and workstations are out of Apple's territory, and the main reason for Swift having to do well on Linux as backend language for iDevices apps.

This was the first linux that I ran on a Powermac 6500 for years since I was never a fan of MacOS 8 or 9. There were some compatibility issues and bugs, but it was a nice alternative to MacOS before the PowerPC linux distros came about.

I remember when I got into Linux in 1998, I had an Intel machine but it was common to hear from people in online communities with macs talking about mklinux.

A little bit later there was a more typical macppc port.

The first non-MacOS OS I ever booted was MkLinux. On a PowerPC 9500. I convinced my mom to drive to a Borders book store to get a book about it. There were no books about Linux at that location in whatever part of the 90s. It booted to a CLI and I had no idea what to do. I didn’t have a second computer to look up commands (as though I’d have the vocabulary to find enough info on a dialup connection to restore usability same-day). I think I reinstalled MacOS 8 or 9 same evening. I needed my computer back!

Computers are pretty great. I throw VMs around like they are candy, now. What an embarrassment of riches we have with modern tech! Side note: I remember the first time I got two computers to talk and how exciting that was. And just the other day, a post about 25GbPS networking (not me, Jeff Geerling).

Apologies for typos. Just woke.

Edit: clarification about 25

Did the book not explain how to use it?

Back in the early 2000s, I had an old salvaged Power Macintosh 8100AV running MkLinux. It served as my personal bastion host, and I also used it to run a few lightweight services, like BitchX or FTP.

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