Debian Brought Back To Life On M68K-Based Amigas

The port of Debian GNU/Linux for the Motorola 68000 processors has been revived, which now allows for a working Debian OS to run once again on computers like the Amiga 3000/4000 and Atari.

It's been announced via a blog post on Christmas Eve that the Debian port to the Motorola m68k has been brought back to life.

The m68k Linux support began to break when glibc began to require thread-local storage, which wasn't available on m68k. When that glibc change occurred, breakage happened and no one stepped up for a few years to fix it. The glibc problem was fixed up when Linux support was added for ColdFire processors since the hardware is similar to that of the Motorola CISC processors, but by that time Debian needed to rebootstrap the entire architecture.

Jump to this year, there's now ARAnyM, an "Atari Running On Any Machine" emulator that picked up Linux support so m68k support could be done from virtually any modern PC with this Debian/m68k emulator. Besides having this emulator support to work on bringing back up to par the m68k port, a Debian maintainer (Thorsten Glaser) personally took to ensuring Debian m68k packages were in good shape.

As of yesterday, the Debian project has their first m68k "buildd" host running and generating packages for the first time in many years.