I used to have a Apple Centris 610 that ran NetBSD/mac68k. I got it as a side-effect of some horse-trading in the late '90s/early 2000s and I wanted another UNIX box to play with, so it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. It was a 68LC040 model so I couldn't do A/UX on it without a CPU swap, and IIRC neither Linux/m68k nor mkLinux supported the hardware at the time, making NetBSD the only practical choice without spending money. It was a quirky little machine, and I destroyed it repeatedly trying things, but that means it did its job well.

I was recently working out using NetBSD 5.1 (..the last version that could be booted to a usable shell from only two floppies) to image the hard drive of an old Pre-USB laptop I picked up for a dumb retrocomputing project.

(The beginning of that project burbled up on HN a few months ago: A ThinkPad 560E because I want a fully supported period-correct machine to run OpenStep/Rhapsody on. I'm backing up the original Windows95 install by DDing the drive to a virtual SCSI disc on a SCSI2SD, plugged in to an Adaptec SlimSCSI 1460D PCMCIA SCSI Adapter. Both because getting the HD out of a 560 chassis is a pain, and because I set myself a "don't physically open the machine" conduct challenge for sport).

Having a tiny, absolutely consistent little UNIX that can just do things like the above because it supports a staggering array of hardware is really pretty delightful.

Similarly, in the '90s I had a second-hand Mac IIsi (with a second hard drive stuffed in place of the floppy) as a poor man's UNIX workstation. Later I worked my way through various other second-hand workstations (VAX, MIPS, Alpha) all running NetBSD.

In my experience the 68k branches tend to be pretty far behind in packages on the repositories. So, you'd be forced to compile a lot of stuff yourself to get much mileage. Given that you're already running the PC equivalent of a rusted out CJ-7, maybe that's just fine.

I keep meaning to help with the pkg repositories. Some part of me thinks it would be relaxing.

A lot of packages use autoconf which is really slow on a 68k machine.

"PC equivalent of a rusted out CJ-7"

heh nice

Funny you should ask that - after reading the above release info, I went down a rabbit hole looking at the m68k release and seeing if there was more Amiga info - I found a short youtube of a guy booting NetBSD on his Amiga, but nothing major beyond that. Looks like you need a full 68k CPU (not an EC version) and a lot of ram - which most stock Amigas don't have. I'd love to give it a go tho - I've got the hardware.

I used to run NetBSD on all kinds of 68k based VME bus cards, and would occasionally do builds for a friends Amiga. I think he had a 33MHz '030 upgrade, so the 50Mhz '060 was quite a speed bump. The Amiga was cooler, tho. Still have a bunch of the VME kit.

I did at one point long ago.

But now I kinda wanna do that so I can see ZFS on a 68K machine.

Some things are not meant for the eyes of mortals...

I completely agree, fellow mortal!

Not on an Amiga but I do run it on a Macintosh.