{"id":283499,"date":"2026-06-29T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/29\/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadrive\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T04:25:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T08:25:07","slug":"its-linux-on-a-sega-megadrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/29\/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadrive\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/06\/29\/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadrive\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-29 04:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: hackaday.com<\/a><\/p>\n

If you were in the market for a games console in 1990, the chances are that the object of your desire was either a Super Nintendo with its 16-bit 6502 derivative, or the Sega Megadrive, sold as the Genesis in North America, with its Motorola 68000. Both machines featured impressive graphics and sound for their time, but they remain firmly in the 16-bit era. Which makes it a surprise to see LinuxMD. It\u2019s Linux, for the Sega Megadrive, with the latest mainline kernel.<\/p>\n

The Motorola 68000 series of chips was the first porting target for Linux, and is still maintained in 2026. This build runs from an SD card\u00a0 in a modern Megadrive storage peripheral, and is reported to run on the original hardware. The lowly 68000 in the Sega doesn\u2019t have a memory management unit required for the full Linux experience, so what\u2019s really running here is a kernel compiled with the -nommu option. That in itself is a feat, on this architecture. On it you get smolutils, a cut down coreutils, and that seems to be it.<\/p>\n

We like this project, for pushing both console and kernel to the limit, even though we see that maybe it\u2019s not the most practical Linux machine. Meanwhile though, this isn\u2019t the only UNIX-like OS for this console.<\/p>\n

Image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/06\/29\/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadrive\/ Publish Date: 2026-06-29 04:00:00 Source Domain: hackaday.com If…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":283500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/megadrive-linux-featured.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-283499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283501,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283499\/revisions\/283501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}