[ILUG] AppleMackintosh ST's

[Brian Foley]

Hmmm. There never was a Mac ST, however there were Mac SEs and Mac SE/30s.

Mac SEs are 8MHz 68000 based, and the SE/30s have 16MHz 68030s.

There are 3 UNIXy OSes that'll work on 68K Macs -- NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux/m68k. All of them require at least a 68020 with MMU or a 68030 or better. NetBSD is by far the oldest, and most mature of the above, but I hear that the Linux port is making good progress. If you do have an SE/30, you're in luck, as all the above UNIX-alikes have good support for the SE/30 -- for some reason, it was one of the easier Macs to port to, and it got early support with all the above.

URLs you might find useful are
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k
http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/index.html
http://www.openbsd.org/mac68k.html
http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/

If you've got an ethernet card in the Mac, I'd say the chances are fairly good that its an SE/30. To check this, have a look at the label on the front -- it should say 'Macintosh SE/30' or some such. If the label's worn off, you can check what Mac it is, what System it is running and how much memory it has by choosing 'About the Finder...' from the Apple menu in MacOS.

Both NetBSD and Linux/m68k boot using a MacOS based application (sort of like loadlin.exe for DOS). The NetBSD booter requires MacOS 7.0.1 or better. One of the NetBSD guys has made a floppy disc image that contains a stripped down version of the System Software, and a copy of the NetBSD booter. 

To use TCP/IP on older Macs, you'll want to get your hands on the MacTCP control panel.

Netscape and Internet Explorer are the two big web browsers on the Mac, and both of them require at least a 68020. I can't recall offhand whether Netscape needs MacOS 7.0.1 or later, but I'm pretty sure IE does.

NSCA Telnet, and NiftyTelnet are two decent Telnet apps for MacOS. I'm fairly sure they'll run on MacOS 6 or later.

Fetch is a nice FTP client for MacOS.

Cheers,
Brian.
----------
From: 	David Cathcart
Sent: 	30 September 1999 00:28
To: 	ilug at linux.ie
Subject: 	[ILUG] AppleMackintosh ST's

connectors. Pity my house is allready wired with the normal rj45. Anyway
first question. The second mac boots finder but no icons appear. Dosent
really matter to me but is there anyway i could boot linux on this machine.
Ie boot disk. Little webserver. Has working nic. Secondly is there any
software such as web browsers for the mac os or telnet apps. Cos i cant
seem to find anyway to do anything with the nic at the moment.