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Linux On a Motorola 68000 Solder-less Breadboard

New submitter lars_stefan_axelsson writes: When I was an undergrad in the eighties, "building" a computer meant that you got a bunch of chips and a soldering iron and went to work. The art is still alive today, but instead of a running BASIC interpreter as the ultimate proof of success, today the crowning achievement is getting Linux to run: "What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubbornness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the C standard library, it finally works! (video)"

4 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:LOL fag by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hell, we finally get an actual geek article on slashdot and this is the response? Take your penis envy somewhere else.

  2. Re:You need to create the tutorial by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't imagine the tutorial needed for something like this. To do something like this takes a lot of skill and knowledge. If you managed it you would have learned a lot and it'd take more than a weekend.

  3. Re:How is this "News for Nerds"? by Ogi_UnixNut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Haha!

    For a long time I used to something similar. All ports that were not in use on my firewall would redirect to a port on an old Toshiba T4800CT: 486 with 8MB of RAM and 500mb disk, running linux kernel 2.0.

    It would run nethack on that port, so anyone who would try a connect scan would end up in nethack. Probably confused a bunch of people, and if someone managed to break through that, would be interesting to see what they would make of it.

  4. Re:next... by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The 68008 was discontinued 20 years ago, so this isn't really all that useful even as an educational exercise. Why not pick a current breadboardable, cheap microprocessor and get Linux to run on that? That way, other people can benefit.

    Why even bother with hardware. Why not just emulate it?

    But then again .. why emulate it when you can buy time on a virtual system?

    Then again why do all that when you could just be watching TV?

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