Supported Macintosh Hardware

Gary_B · February 23, 2001, 7:45pm

I’m trying to determine if I can install QNX on an old Macintosh Performa
6214CD computer that I have laying around. I tried to install Linux on this
system, but my information was very explicit that this specific model was
absolutely not supported. Is this also the case with QNX?

Supposedly, this system has the Motorola 604 processor. The QNX Developer’s
Network site lists support for the 604e processor. My gut feeling is that I
will not be able to install QNX on this system. Can anyone confirm or deny
this?

Igor_Kovalenko2 · February 23, 2001, 7:50pm

Not the one you can download, for sure. They support processor yes, but
in commercial version only. And then you need some other stuff. You need
some way to boot, and support for harware and chances are you’ll have
trouble there.

“Gary B.” wrote:

I’m trying to determine if I can install QNX on an old Macintosh Performa
6214CD computer that I have laying around. I tried to install Linux on this
system, but my information was very explicit that this specific model was
absolutely not supported. Is this also the case with QNX?

Supposedly, this system has the Motorola 604 processor. The QNX Developer’s
Network site lists support for the 604e processor. My gut feeling is that I
will not be able to install QNX on this system. Can anyone confirm or deny
this?

Tony_Mantler · February 26, 2001, 8:31pm

Previously, Gary B. wrote in comp.os.qnx:

I’m trying to determine if I can install QNX on an old Macintosh Performa
6214CD computer that I have laying around. I tried to install Linux on this
system, but my information was very explicit that this specific model was
absolutely not supported. Is this also the case with QNX?

David Gatwood (with a little help from myself) ported MkLinux to the Performa series Powermacs last summer. You can check it out at http://www.mklinux.org/.

I later sold my 5200 to Takashi Oe, who is an active developer with the more mainstream PPC-Linux effort in order to encourage development there, but I haven’t seen any progress from that yet.

I have not seen any news of any other non-MacOS operating system (BeOS, QNX, NetBSD, whatever) functioning on the performa series machines. They’re not very well designed systems - in fact, rather poorly designed even compared to the earlier x100 series powermacs, or even some of the 68k Quadra machines.

Cheers - Tony ‘Nicoya’ Mantler

\