Debian on Motorola 680x0

The Motorola 680x0 series of processors have powered personal computers and workstations since the mid-1980s. Debian currently runs on the 68020, 68030, 68040 and 68060 processors: this is an unofficial port meaning that there's not an official and released m68k port any more but this port is under development.

Please note that a memory management unit (MMU) is required; this rules out the "EC" variants of these processors. Floating-point emulation is available; however, it is not functional on some mac models due to a bug in some revisions of the 68LC040 processor. (68LC040 processors in other subarchitectures are fine; only Macintoshes appear to have been shipped with the broken 68LC040 processors).

Status

The Debian m68k port was first officially released with Debian 2.0 (hamm) and was an official port until Debian 4.0 (etch). There's now an effort to revive this port.

Currently, the Debian/m68k port supports Atari, Amiga, VMEbus, and some Macintosh systems.

For further information on the current status of the m68k port, please visit our wiki page.

Help is always needed and welcome! In particular, kernels and boot images supporting other ports of the Linux/m68k kernel, like the Q40/Q60 and Sun 3, would be nice.

If you're willing to help, we maintain TODO lists on the Debian wiki for the Debian/m68k system and The Debian-installer port to the m68k architecture.

The Debian/68k autobuild system contains up to date information about the porting effort. In case of questions and/or problems related to the autobuild system please contact debian-68k@lists.debian.org with a subject tag of "[buildd]".

Credits

This is a list of people who are working on the Debian/m68k project. It also includes some significant contributors who have "moved on" to other things. Let us know if you're missing from this list!

Frank Neumann
Launched m68k port of Debian.
Martin "Joey" Schulze
Provided infrastructure at Infodrom for "kullervo", the primary build daemon, to be connected to the Internet. Also helped organize Linux hacker meetings at Oldenburg.
Roman Hodek
With James Troup, created buildd, the automated build daemon for the m68k port. buildd is now used by other architectures, too.
James Troup
Wrote quinn-diff and other utilities to automate package building.
David Huggins-Daines
Maintained m68k support on the boot-floppies team. Also supports the upstream Mac kernel.
Michael Schmitz
Built and tested the installation system for 2.1.
Christian T. Steigies
Maintains Debian/68k kernel packages.
Stephen R. Marenka
Together with Wouter Verhelst, ported debian-installer (the installation system for Debian 3.1 and above) to the m68k architecture.
Wouter Verhelst
Together with Stephen Marenka, ported debian-installer (the installation system for Debian 3.1 and above) to the m68k architecture.
Thorsten Glaser
Collected patches from Debian/m68k maintainers, Linux m68k developers, and other people; brought Debian/m68k through the transition from linuxthreads to NPTL with TLS by integrating those into the Debian packages and being the human equivalent of a buildd for long enough to bootstrap Sid again. Finn Thain, Andreas Schwab and Geert Uytterhoeven provided valuable input to this, besides those already mentioned above.

Contact information

The mailing list for this project is debian-68k@lists.debian.org. To subscribe, send a message containing the word "subscribe" as the subject to debian-68k-request@lists.debian.org, or use the mailing list web page. You can also browse and search the list archives.

The m68k porters' mailing list used to be at m68k-build@nocrew.org. This also used to be the contact address for the m68k autobuild system. However, to contact m68k porters today, the preferred procedure is to use debian-68k@lists.debian.org with a subject tag of [buildd].

Please send comments about these web pages to the Debian/m68k mailing list.

Links

A dedicated page gather some links related to the m68k port.