At 9:51 AM -0500 1/7/98, Andy Sinesio wrote:
>I have a Centris 610 that I would like to put NetBSD on (it's becoming
>quite useless as a Mac OS box) and I know there are some issues with teh
>68LC040 chip inside.  It does have 24 megs of RAM and a 500 meg hard
>disk, so I assume it could make a decent unix machine if I could get the
>processor to work correctly.  How much would it cost to upgrade it to a
>full 68040 if that is the only answer?
>

I am using NetBSD 1.3 on another 68LC040 machine-- a Performa 630 (36 MB
RAM). I'm running it off of a Zip drive (no swap). My machine has not been
upgraded-- it is using only the software FPE. Despite its status as an
unsupported machine, I have found it rather usable. Sure, I get
segmentation faults and illegal instruction errors fairly frequently. But
this has not made the machine unusable; they are only an annoyance. I am
able to run X-Windows, various games, PPP, Lynx, etc. (I don't have enough
disk space to try the compiler package.)
The worst thing I have encountered is that I sometimes have to type
"startx" 15 or 20 times before X successfully starts up. But once it starts
running, it is fairly cooperative. I have had uptimes lasting a couple days
(having a swap partition would lengthen this).

So if you can put up with frequent segmentation faults, you might be able
to get by without upgrading your machine until the NetBSD's FPE is fixed.

Speaking of the FPE... does anyone know the current status of that project?

John Burg