I was wanting a BHA machine and I acquired, from craigslist, a PM7100 in excellent condition. There was absolutely no sign of capacitor aging - including the PSU. The original 700 MB Quantum SCSI harddrive was function although it didn’t sound perfectly happy. The floppy and cdrom drives were healthy, and the onboard ethernet good. ADB was great and power/interrupt key combos worked.
I bumped RAM from 24MB (8+16) to 136MB (8+128) with easily available and economical EDO SIMMS from memorymasters.
Before deciding how to replace the internal SCSI, I plugged in an external ZuluSCSI Mini with 64GB SD card.
I first installed MacOS9.1 (requiring greater than 32MB). OS9 is not the fastest OS for this machine but it provides the comforts HFS+, good networking and System Profiler, etc. OSX was never supported on this platform.
A BootX1.2.1 bootable kernel is 2.4.27:
Sadly, I’ve been unable to locate source for this kernel with its nubus-pmac patches.
X11 failed to find a workable configuration automatically. X11 configuration is often a tease on vintage Macs but this works with the motherboard ariel2 framebuffer video (with no HPV/AV card):
After some trial and error, I found this combination:
The second stage of installation configures the Base and installs packages. I used BootX to load the same 2.4.27 kernel as YDL. But the addition boot argument of
is required to be able to type at the console - see https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/keycodes for details. I installed X11 and a handful of development and network services, but this required some fussing to cope with dselect/dpkg failures. But, a little surprising, X11 (Gnome and KDE) sprang to life using the same framebuffer configuration as YDL.
I bumped RAM from 24MB (8+16) to 136MB (8+128) with easily available and economical EDO SIMMS from memorymasters.
Before deciding how to replace the internal SCSI, I plugged in an external ZuluSCSI Mini with 64GB SD card.
I first installed MacOS9.1 (requiring greater than 32MB). OS9 is not the fastest OS for this machine but it provides the comforts HFS+, good networking and System Profiler, etc. OSX was never supported on this platform.
Linux
See https://nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net (*1) and linked pages for how to run assorted Linux releases on Nubus PowerMac. There a 3 ways to boot a kernel on Nubus machines .. yaboot, etc require OFW:- The MkLinux Booter
- BootX1.2.1 (the latter 1.2.2 version crashes) - see https://web.archive.org/web/20050207105304/http://penguinppc.org/~benh/
- miboot (a packaged variant of BootX)
MkLinux
MkLinux DR3 runs fine - see https://www.mklinux.org. The 6100 was the first PPC mac that MkLinux supported. I installed a disk image taken from a previous installation from my pm7600 .. although the install procedure from cdrom image is straightforward.YellowDog Linux
i’ve had a lot of success over the years with YDL. YDL3.0 installed cleanly in a 4GB drive on the pm7100 from MkLinux Booter kernel plus installer:- see “Kernel with YellowDogLinux 3.0 installer [ http ] (updated June 23, 2003)” from (*1)
A BootX1.2.1 bootable kernel is 2.4.27:
- “Stable Kernel (2.4.27) with input driver enabled (Required for Debian Woody and YDL 2.x, 3.0) [ http ] (updated August 11, 2004) for use with BootX”
nubus_simm=b0:8m,b1:32m,b2:32m,b3:32m,b4:32m Sadly, I’ve been unable to locate source for this kernel with its nubus-pmac patches.
X11 failed to find a workable configuration automatically. X11 configuration is often a tease on vintage Macs but this works with the motherboard ariel2 framebuffer video (with no HPV/AV card):
Section "Device"
# no known options
Identifier "Generic OF compatible"
Driver "fbdev"
VendorName "Generic OF compatible"
BoardName "Generic OF compatible"
#BusID
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Generic OF compatible"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 8
Subsection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "832x624"
EndSubsection
EndSection
Debian Linux
Installing Debian PPC on this Nubus machine is more problematic. Initially I didn’t think it would be feasible at all. Nubus-pmac was only briefly and partially supported back in the day and was dropped as soon as OpenFirmWare machines appeared. Very little remains available on the Internet. There’s a number of issues for the PM7100:- Finding a pair of kernel and ramdisk with the Installer.
- Being able to boot and run the Installer.
- Finding a cd-rom/dvd-rom/network image compatible with the Installer.
After some trial and error, I found this combination:
- “Kernel with Debian Woody installer (outdated) [ http ] (updated October 29, 2002)”
- MkLinux Booter launched from MacOS9.
- A dvd-rom image of Woody 3.0r6 from debian-30r6-dvd-powerpc-binary-1.iso placed on a ZuluSCSI Mini.
The second stage of installation configures the Base and installs packages. I used BootX to load the same 2.4.27 kernel as YDL. But the addition boot argument of
keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes=1 is required to be able to type at the console - see https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/keycodes for details. I installed X11 and a handful of development and network services, but this required some fussing to cope with dselect/dpkg failures. But, a little surprising, X11 (Gnome and KDE) sprang to life using the same framebuffer configuration as YDL.
