I could use some help. I'm not familiar with macs at all and was given 3 of them. One of them is a 5260/120 NOT PERFORMA. with internal cd It has system 7.5 on it right now and has an ethernet port in back. I'm sure its an ethernet port just incase your thinking its appletalk. I was hooked up to a school system and so has lots of software pieces missing so I'm thinking I need to completely reinstall everything, but I have no software for macs. Any help would be greatly appreciated. My son is 8 and would like to use it. We use KDE and XFCE4 on the rest of our machines. The other two my friend who gave them to me calls "suitcase" macs. They are in blue and brown canvas suitcases respectively. I think one even has a apple printer inside. The use for these would be for my daughter (10 ) and for a email/web client. The brown one is a Macintosh plus 1mb 68030 we're pretty sure the battery is bad so we have set it aside ( its deteriorated ). The blue one is a MacSE 1mb with a "the big picture" card added. and 2 800k drives. I realize these things are ancient but I really hate to throw anything away.
old mac help needed
Archived thread 113929 from Apple PPC Users. Markdown source: Apple_PPC_Users/thread_113929_old_mac_help_needed.md
Hmm. I don't know what you're going to fit on there these days. I'm not certain Ubuntu will go on such a small drive. You might want to check out "dsl" or damn small linux.
It is a distro that is geared to be no bigger than 50MB (I know its too big for you), but you can probably get away with not installing much of it.
Although I think the only way you are going to get anything on there is by compiling your own kernel, stripping out absolutely everything you don't need. I do know you can get a fully operation system onto a single 1.44MB floppy, so this shouldn't be too much of a stretch of the mind. Only I have never done anything like that. The oldest computer I have has 600MB of disk space. (the one before that kinda blew up. just about. And all previous machines we gave away).
But I'm probably not the person who should be answering this question.
Can anybody else help out here?
If the 5260/120 is a PowerMac (PowerPC based) then ubuntu may fit in it as long as you have at least a 2GB HD (and that's scratching hard). As for the others. Only debian can run on them b/c they're 68k and debian is the only linux system which have a 68k version and the 68k version only runs in Macs with MMU/PMMU (Paged memory management unit).
yes the 5260 IS a powerpc :D I think it has a 4.3G hd. I have a mac disk for breezy ( shipit) but I don't know how to get the mac to read it on bootup. I don't have any floppies for it.
You might find some useful information here:
I won't add to the good advice you're getting advice on the Performa; but you're not going to find linux that'll run on the SE and the Plus. Great machines in their day--the Plus could be maxed out at ONE FULL MEGABITE OF MEMORY! In fact, you could attach a hard drive and run Quark XPress on a Plus, and print PostScript files to a LaserWriter--that was the beginning of desktop publishing.
If you're eager to try out reallly old Mac software on the SE there's plenty around on the web. I used to be able to make 800k floppies (that's what the SE took, I believe) and I have some old systems & software around. Let me know if you'd like to play.
Michael Steinberg