Greetings all,

This seems like a lovely place to discuss many wonderful things. I can't recall how I found myself here today, but I am glad I did.

I will eventually find myself on the IRC channel, but wanted to write this introduction.

General goals and aspirations:

• Learn C
  
• Get *nix running on my mac68k
  
• Possibly continue maintenance on twm/ctwm/vtwm because I think its really cool.
  
• Other projects as they occur
  

Looking forward to reading through the past threads here.

Welcome to nixers. have fun!

Hello 8bits! nice intorduction!

I hope you'll have a nice stay here. Glad to see some more people into the C game! How far did you go yet? Any project to share?

Feel free to visit http://git.nixers.net and join a project!

Welcome to the forums.

(08-08-2017, 05:18 PM)1Byte Wrote: Learn C
Get *nix running on my mac68k
Possibly continue maintenance on twm/ctwm/vtwm because I think its really cool.
Other projects as they occur

That sounds great.

(08-08-2017, 05:18 PM)1Byte Wrote: Looking forward to reading through the past threads here.

We'd also love to see your new threads.

Welcome, CHAR_BIT! :D

(09-08-2017, 04:39 AM)jkl Wrote: Welcome, CHAR_BIT! :D

Oh damn, that pun... Made my day!

(08-08-2017, 05:45 PM)z3bra Wrote: CHAR_BIT

Programming languages seem to come very hard for me to wrap my mind around. Mechanical engineering I find much easier.

I don't have any projects to share because after about a month of trying I quit and switched to PERL, which I found equally difficult.
For me, I have discovered it is the teaching method - or lack thereof - that is the most problematic. So, after a long hiatus, I have decided to go
back to C (and perhaps some Assembly) and just stick with that until I figure it out.

Most of the conversations had seem to be given by people that already have a very deep understanding of the language, AND cynicism about teaching the less fortunate.

Anyhow, thanks for the welcoms!

(09-08-2017, 07:08 AM)1Byte Wrote: Most of the conversations had seem to be given by people that already have a very deep understanding of the language, AND cynicism about teaching the less fortunate.

I personally think this is a shame.
I'm a proponent of the "everything is teachable to anyone as long as you move forward into the subject in the right manner".

However, sometimes it's at the cost of dilluting some of the specificities and sometimes making it less precise.
But I think it's good even at this cost, the honing and little details can come later, once the person has got a general understanding of what's happening.

Quote:welcome to nixers!

(08-08-2017, 05:18 PM)1Byte Wrote:

• Get *nix running on my mac68k
  

That's pretty cool. I recently got my old Sun workstation up and running with OpenBSD, but that's pretty much plug and play, sparc64 is so well supported. mac68k is another story entirely. I'm pretty sure you're stuck with NetBSD. But "stuck" is a strong word, the most recent release of NetBSD is available for mac68k and they even build packages for it!

But I am skeptical. NetBSD is notorious (in the OpenBSD community anyway haha) for not building packages actually on the real machines, they cross-compile. I seem to recall one time none of their vax images actually worked but no-one noticed because they had never been tested by anyone at NetBSD, whereas OpenBSD actually uses VAXen to compile the vax packages, so you know it boots and can run a wide range of compilers, build tools etc.

My point is that you may face some difficulties getting any software to actually work on your mac68k. Good luck, I hope your road is easy and trouble-free. Most of all, I hope all of your hardware still works!

If you have any trouble, let me direct you to NetBSD's mac68k mailing list: http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/. But I don't use NetBSD and I don't own any working mac68k hardware (I wish), so I can't offer any specific help.

In fact, you may already know all of this, since the first search results for mac68k are the {Net,Open}BSD pages. We (nixers.net community) would greatly appreciate any updates on your experience if you do eventually get it working. Lots of us get really excited at old hardware :)

(09-08-2017, 09:06 PM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: . We (nixers.net community) would greatly appreciate any updates on your experience if you do eventually get it working. Lots of us get really excited at old hardware :)

You bet! This is one of the reasons I was very happy to have stumbled upon this community. I love old hardware too! I recently asked a cyberpunk asthethic group which I frequent if they might prefer and Alpha or Sparc setup for a server, and all I got was "Dell Poweredge/Blade", and "the power requirements make old hardware not worth it".

Never did answer my question. I am currently dealing with a dead battery, which only recently died - the Mac (IIci with cache go faster card, ethernet, external hard disks, the works!) did work quite well until a few days ago. I suspect the PRAM battery finally died. I will start a new thread when I get it back up and running.