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Free Unixen On RS/600 37t?

Posted by Cliff on from the ports-for-obscure-hardware dept.

solice asks: "Does anybody out there know if there is a BSD or Linux port that will run on an IBM RS/600 37t? It has an MCA bus and a POWER chip(not power pc)? I got this great unix box and no OS. Help!" Is this just an AIX-only box?

3 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. AIX itself is pretty cheap on eBay... by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 2
    Used copies of 4.1.x (which would be an awful lot faster than 4.3.x on older hardware) go for about $15 or so if you can find them.

    - A.P.
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  2. For the most part... by The+Iconoclast · · Score: 2

    No. I have a behemoth (pardon the pun of those of you who know what machine I'm talking about) of a 340 RS/6000 sitting on my desk at work we have to use AIX 3.x because off all the old software we nolonger have installation media. It was set up SOOOOO badly. I wish maybe that the harddrive would finally die and we could reinstall everything correctly.

    I scoured the net looking for something besides AIX to run on this beast, but to no avail. The problem with the POWER chips is that they are not chips as much as they are chipsets. There are about 4 or 5 chips that are on a "processor card" in this machine. REAL UGLY. Plus they don't implement either a sub- or super- set of the PowerPC instruction set, but something completely different that was kind of merged into what was to become the PowerPC.

    Ichhh!

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  3. NetBSD might be workable by randombit · · Score: 2

    Linux doesn't run on POWER (though a port from PowerPC might be possible), and doesn't support MCA. However, NetBSD seems at least interested in running on RS/6000. From http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/:

    IBM RS/6000 (MCA based)

    The pre-PowerPC RS/6000 machines were based on the POWER and POWER2 architecture, with Microchannel (MCA) bus. There is i386 MCA bus code in NetBSD tree now, which would help with the MCA aspect.

    However, this is in the "Suggested Ports" category. So if you've got some time on your hands and like to hack stuff, you've got a great project. Otherwise you'll have to run AIX until someone gets around to doing it.

    First post? :P