Trying to get the IIci to work

Since I've got a (more or less) functional IIci set up now, I'm trying to create an emile package on it, here at DebConf5.

Not much is working, however.

One thing I forgot to do is to check the amount of RAM in this thing before I left. Turns out it runs on just 10MB, which is not much. Trying to run apt-get update over its serial line (no network interface builtin, and I don't have a NuBus network board) sorta works, but when it reads the package lists afterwards (and on subsequent apt-get upgrade runs as well), it hangs once it's reached 98%.

Been trying to get it to work almost all day yesterday, but so far no luck. It appears to be a VM deadlock of sorts — when it happens, switching virtual consoles is still possible, but no input is accepted; I can't even cleanly reboot the bloody thing.

So, I've just downloaded kernel-image-2.6.8-mac (which is installing as I'm typing this), and will try and see whether it works. Hopefully it does (there are known issues with some m68k macs and 2.6 kernels, though I don't know which models exactly or whether this model is affected), in which case I should be able to get a working EMILE package done.

If I get that to work, I'll also produce an emile-installer udeb. And if DebConf5 isn't nearly finished by then, there most certainly are other interesting things to do.

Watch this space.