On 1999/07/25 at 8:16pm -0400, you wrote:
>[...]  All
>attempts at so much as booting of the boot floppy have failed so far.
>Anybody else interested in these machines?

I am, too, and might even have a little time to poke at it in a month or
two. To that end, is there anywhere a guide to setting up a cross-build
environment (preferably from pmax, if it matters, or from mac68k or vax)?
I have no access to any supported macppc machine.

C600s don't boot well. A couple of years ago I played briefly with
LinuxPPC, and was *usually*, but not always, able to boot from floppy
(provided of course that the load-base was moved to avoid the screen),
but that used a COFF file on an HFS file system ("boot fd:kernel.coff")
rather than a raw disk ("boot fd:0"). Apparently these machines cannot
boot from SCSI disks at all, and cannot boot from IDE if the
output-device is the screen. I think something like this may be the case
with booting from fd:0 as well; if I remember correctly, the last time I
tried, I could load the kernel (sometimes?) with a serial console, but
not with a screen/keyboard console.

Another problem with the C600 is the CD-ROM drive; there's something
nasty about it (I've forgotten what) that gave some versions of LinuxPPC
fits when probing the SCSI bus.

IMHO the best long-term solution for the C600 would be to boot from
MacOS, as mac68k does, and as NuBus Macs presumably will have to.

--
Kevin Schoedel
schoedel@kw.igs.net