←back to thread

I bought a Mac

(loganius.org)
237 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
SpecialistK ◴[] No.43677433[source]
The late PowerPC-era Macs are really fun to play with, because they're an interesting blend of modern niceties like USB and Ethernet but are limited with how old most software is. There's still a scene of people working on bringing newer versions of GCC and other *nix utilities to Tiger or Leopard, working with the pre-release PPC betas of Snow Leopard, and trying to keep online services working despite aging TLS versions and retired APIs. Compiling takes forever until it fails with an obscure C11 error or missing C library features. And that makes for a fun, if often frustrating, challenge.

But PPC32 Linux support is quickly falling off. Gentoo isn't just used because it's fun to leave your lampshade iMac G4 compiling a kernel for days, but because it's one of the few distros still supporting the platform. There's unsupported testing repos for Debian (and maybe Ubuntu?) plus the up-and-coming Adelie. Otherwise your best bet is OpenBSD - FreeBSD and NetBSD usually lack precompiled ports, and FreeBSD has announced the next major release will almost definitely drop 32 bit PPC.

The 64 bit G5 systems are much better supporte. I'm pretty sure they can boot ppc64le that many distros target. They're also even more modern - the final models had PCIe, SATA, and up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Sadly there's nothing modern about the power efficiency, nor the self-destructing water cooling system.

replies(11): >>43677491 #>>43677500 #>>43677524 #>>43677545 #>>43677606 #>>43677681 #>>43678193 #>>43678321 #>>43679399 #>>43688319 #>>43709006 #
1. CursedSilicon ◴[] No.43677524[source]
Minor corrections

- Only the G5 *Quad* had PCI-E, all the others were PCI-X (yuck)

The Quad was also the only one to take DDR2 RAM, though did support up to 16GB

All Apple Macs though are PPC64 Big Endian, not ppc64le. This causes no end of problems with software that now assumes "IF PPC = LE"

replies(1): >>43677680 #
2. zdw ◴[] No.43677680[source]
All of the PowerMac11,2 models that used the dual-core on a single silicon 970MP G5s supported PCIe:

https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=Po...

The quad was just two dual cores in a single chassis, with an unfortunately prone to breaking liquid cooling setup.