Posted by Steve Bach on December 20, 1999 at 22:49:58:
In Reply to: PB5300 posted by John Mulhall on November 18, 1999 at 08:07:16:
I've got a 5300. I ran MkLinux DR3 on it for a while and am planning on reinstlling it soon, but updating the kernel (I hope that 2.2 comes along soom). It is a bit of a pain to work with for installing. There is no SCSI support, no PCMCIA support, and no floppy support. ALso if you boot it into Linux with an external display on the video port the system will crash and burn. You cannot hook an external CD to do the install, as the kernel does not suport SCSI, so to do the install I hooked up the thing via SCSI disk mode to a Beige G3 running Mk (now running X Server), and installed it. THe thing is that after I installed it I could not get it to boot because /etc/fstab was hosed since the installer assumed that the system was goint to boot off a SCSI HD. I was able to mount it from the G3 in SCSI disk mode and fix up fstab, and it booted fine. It worked well (in a manner of speaking) until the Hard Drive died. The sad thing is taht you really have limited support. Since there is no PCMCIA you have no Ethernet, and a Unix system without a network is pretty painful. I played with it mostly to read man pages on, and play X games. I set up a HFS partition (not HFS+) as a transfer zone and mounted it from Linux. There is a section in MkLinux.org that discusses doing that, and it makes it bearable to get stuff in. I just got a 5500 with MkLinux and installed on it, and so I am going to install it on my 5300 again via SCSI disk mode. I think that the new kernels may work a little better, though I have a feeling that SCSI and PCMCIA may still be a ways off. There is serial support, so if you have a modem you could try setting up PPP. Feel free to ask me about it.