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Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard (2014)
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the C standard library, it finally works! I’ve built several other DIY computer systems before, but never took their software beyond simple assembly language programs.
I primarily relied on the Linux grep command to search through the thousands of kernel source files for strings of interest, then stared at the code until I could understand how it worked. And more fundamentally, I discovered that it wasn’t possible to fit all of Linux in 512K RAM, including the kernel code, static data, root filesystem, and dynamically allocated memory. This 68008 system on a protoboard was intended to be only an experiment and proof-of-concept for the real 68 Katy, which I had planned to build on a custom PCB with a full 68000 CPU, a CPLD for glue logic, more RAM, an SD card, and ethernet.
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