←back to thread

I bought a Mac

(loganius.org)
237 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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 #
karlgkk ◴[] No.43678321[source]
I've never understood running PPC Linux on old machines. Unless you're interested in running some of the really weird and esoteric scientific packages, or you're trying to unfuck a machine (which I've used ppclinux for many times lol), I don't get the point?

These machines were built as a package. Both the software and hardware was designed with an ethos in mind. It's bespoke.

I can't tell you what to do with your hardware, but if you want to run old linux, you can just do that in like qemu or something.

replies(1): >>43678537 #
1. SpecialistK ◴[] No.43678537[source]
I mostly agree, and dual boot Tiger and Leopard on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4. But just as those OSes aren't very useful outside of novelty (or maybe some older Mac OS games that haven't been ported to a newer platform) so is running a modern Linux distro or BSD on it. The times I've done it, I've done the install, clicked around for a few minutes, and then move on. Sometimes struggling with and overcoming the hassle of installing an OS (or newer version of Bash on 20 year old Mac OS X) is the point. Journey vs destination and all that.