/tech/ - Technology★

I don't know about G4s, but I have a G3, and over the years, Linux and even OpenBSD and NetBSD have bloated up to the point that they're not really viable on the G3 anymore. About a decade ago, I ran OpenBSD and Gentoo on my PowerBook G3, and they were pretty snappy. For such an old machine, anyway.

After letting the laptop sit in a closet for a long time, I decided to install a recent OpenBSD on it. 6.0 or 6.1 I think. It took about 20 minutes to boot. I figured putting Gentoo on it would just be agony, so I tried Debian instead. It was a little better, but still not usable for practical purposes. I think it took about 5-7 minutes to get into X (from console with xinit, not a session manager) and twm.

A G4 would be faster obviously. RAM is also part of the issue on my machine. But my anecdote is that while these Unix-likes may still nominally support PPC, they're bloating like middle-aged housewives.

I know that PowerPC is considered a Tier2 platform on FreeBSD, and to be honest it doesn't like there's much activity there. Obviously older releases will work fine, but it might give you problems for more recent software.

https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

>>859557

Interesting. Debian recently dropped 32 bit PPC support so it seems like Gentoo would probably be my best bet. I would probably want to build my packages in a emulator though because I can only imagine the time it would take to build Firefox on a G4.

>>859571

Yeah the lack of proper security maintenance kind of defeats the entire purpose of running Unix on it. iirc binaries are also not provided for tier 2, so fuck that anyway.

>>859557

G3 came out in 1998. Any G4 is going to be worlds different. Its like comparing a 266Mhz original PII to a 10 year newer Core2. If you put a modern OS with lots of features on such an old CPU with out optimizing your going to have problems. Even Apple dropped early G3 support for OSX in 10.4 and all G3 support in 10.5

OpenBSD has KARL and a few other things that take CPU power to get started that will be a struggle on a G3.

NetBSD has not changed at all for the most part since the 2.0 days.

To OP Gentoo, OpenBSD or NetBSD will all run just fine on a G4. I run NetBSD 8.0BETA on a G4 powerbook and a 600mhz G3 ibook. I have also played around with Gentoo but you have to be ok waiting over night for things to compile sometimes.

The biggest problem with PPC right now is not the OS actually. Its a modern web browser. The only decent thing right now is TenFourFox and they only support OSX.

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

You are on your own to build something that runs decent on BSD/Linux PPC right now unfortunately.

Are shitty old mac laptops the new thinkpad fad? why are these popping up everywhere

>>859645

Open-firmware and no Intel botnet

>>859637

>G3 came out in 1998. Any G4 is going to be worlds different.

No. The only major difference is AltiVec. Apple could have continued using the PPC750 (G3) but it would have been pointless not to have AltiVec in a computer meant for media editing.

>>859655

>The only major difference is AltiVec.

And a more than doubled clock speed.

>>859572

Debian is still supported on 32-bit PPC as a port.

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/current/powerpc/

I've got in on my iBook G4, it's fine with Window Maker but a little slow with MATE or XFCE.

>>859655

>A 300mhz g3 is not worlds different then a 1.Xghz G4

And altivec makes a big difference on a web browser since everything about the shitty modern web is multimedia loaded.

You can see the drastic difference altivec optimization makes when comparing a generic build of Firefox to tenFOURFox. Or Gimp,mplayer, or anything else that deals with image and video rendering.

>>859551 (OP)

If your going to go gentoo then dont forget something like

<CFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=G4 -mcpu=G4 -mabi=altivec -maltivec -pipe"

That is bigly important if you want a system that runs decent.

>>859642

>implying most software has improved much in the last 20 years

>implying faster computers didn't contribute to the pajeet bloatfest

Most people would still be fine with Windows 95 and 486s if it weren't for games, javascript, and HD streaming.

>>859668

Ah, thanks. I would have missed that.

>>859674

How bad are compile times on the G4? It seems like it would be hellish.

>>859572

>. iirc binaries are also not provided for tier 2, so fuck that anyway.

You could always cross compile them on a faster machine, rather than rely on another man to compile things for you.

>>859674

>A 300mhz g3 is not worlds different then a 1.Xghz G4

How about you not put words into my mouth? Just because Apple stopped using the G3 doesn't mean Motorola did. PPC750CL went up to 1GHz, and the PPC7400 first showed up in the PowerMac 350,400,450 MHz Sawtooth. The WiiU is believed to use a 1.2GHz tri core PPC750.

>>859637

>>859572

Although debian dropped support (they were not dedicated about it in the first place) lubuntu still actively maintains macppc port and packages. I've been using it for over two years so far and did not run into any hairy problems. It's my comfiest lwn reading emacs machine so far.

I'd love to roll gentoo but for hardware this old hard drive failure is an actual threat and I do not really want to rely on cross compiling either so there's not much choice when it comes to OS.

For browsing, midori is hardly idle but usable solution. Although some people do not trust the developers behind the project when it comes to timely security patches, you can mitigate most of the problem by using its built-in js domain controller.

>>859747

Why would you run outdated Firefox tho?

>>859747

Do you still have to disable KMS?

>>859747

Why are you running as root?

>>859704

>WiiU

OP has a ibook. A G4 ibook. Not a wii. I didn't put words in your mouth. YOU said you ran a G3 mac.

>>859687

>How bad are compile times on the G4? It seems like it would be hellish.

Not bad. Your talking hours not days on most things. Something like a browser might take all day. I use pkgsrc which is pretty reliable so if it is something larger I will start it before I go to bed and just let it go over night.

>>859725

A nice improvement to the speed would be to replace the shitty old harddrive with a SSD. Any drive original to a PPC mac is gona be kinda clunky and failure prone by now.

>>859551 (OP)

Gentoo works well, although the stage3 tarballs are getting a little old. I've actually gone back to my G5 running Gentoo as my daily driver. I can do my shitposting, online shopping, and email checking just fine. Firefox works, and as long as umatrix is set to block everything it's a marginally tolerable experience. I still prefer links -g most of the time. The combination of nouveau, PowerPC, and a FX 5200 Ultra GPU results in a steaming pile of shit. I plan to upgrade to a R300 radeon someday.

>tfw no pcie

>>859687

>How bad are compile times on the G4? It seems like it would be hellish.

Here are some numbers from my 2x 1.8 GHz G5. If you triple these numbers, it's probably about what a single 1.0 GHz G4 would do.

>firefox: 3-4 hours

>mesa: 45 minutes

>ffmpeg: 21 minutes

>python 3.5: 9 minutes

>git: 6 minutes

>links: 4 minutes

>bash: 3 minutes

>>859753

It's 52.6.0 ESR, still supported and standard in Debian.

>>859758

No, I'm not sure if it uses it. The framebuffer and X seems to work fine at the native resolution.

>>859759

Didn't log out after editing a few config files.

>>859572

you can use distcc with portage

>>859637

>>859658

>>859794

PBG3 shipped 1997, actually, and PMG4 shipped less than two years later at clockspeeds identical to G3s. Apple continued introducing new G3 Macs clear to 2003, reaching 900MHz, with later 3rd-party G3 upgrades reaching 1.1GHz. By comparison, the last new G4 Macs were introduced in 2005, and the fastest was 1.67GHz, with 3rd-party G4 upgrades topping out at 1.8GHz. As such, the production and performance overlaps were near-total, the primary performance differences being SIMD (not useful in most vintage software) and (although some non-Apple systems like the BeBox did so using G3s) MP.

>tenfourfox

Interestingly, the work being done on TFF is almost singlehandedly sustaining large sections of the non x86/ARM support on non-OS X and even non-PPC environments. Kaiser is a hardcore assembly nut and absolutely /ourguy/.

>>859747

>GNUStep

Not nostalgic enough. When will somebody make a max-comfy classic Mac System Software-clone DE? Even Amiga & Acorn have clone DEs. Just an open source knockoff of Pathfinder or whatever would be a godsend.

Herpaderp, BeBox used 603s, not G3s. Anyhoo, the excuse Apple used for refusing to make MP Macs was identical between both CPUs.

>>859898

>Interestingly, the work being done on TFF is almost singlehandedly sustaining large sections of the non x86/ARM support on non-OS X and even non-PPC environments.

Is there a non-OSX port of TFF? The mainline versions of FF run like total shit on PPC compared to TFF.

>>859571

FreeBSD no longer has precompied binaries for 32bit PPC, procees only if you want to spend 90+ hours compiling your desktop environment of choice.

Installing gentoo on a G5 right now. Its been compiling since yesterday.

>>860031

GL. while you are doing that could you test if suspend/resume works with KMS disabled? AFAIK it cannot sleep with nvidia's graphics driver enabled kernel.

>>860057

Its got a radeon card, not nvidia

>>860063

in any case I'd really appreciate your test. no matter what I do I cannot suspend my G4 powerbook under both OpenBSD and Linux.

>>860057

On my nvidia G5, suspend is completely broken. Disabling KMS doesn't make a difference.

>>860128

You deserve it for using proprietary software.

>>860129

I'm using nouveau. As far as I know, binary nvidia drivers don't even exist for PPC.

>>860142

Maybe there aren't any developers that use Nvidia and PPC. I don't have a problem with my x86 machine and Nouveau.

>>859959

>waiting a little while for your system to be built is a shoah

kek fucking newfag millennials

>>859794

>OP has a ibook. A G4 ibook. Not a wii. I didn't put words in your mouth. YOU said you ran a G3 mac.

OP might have said this. I said the only major difference between the G3 and G4 was AltiVec, and it is.

>>859959

Not only are you a whiny little bitch, you're also forgetting that you can use a modern computer to cross compile for that 32bit powerpc. If that's going to be too difficult for you, then you ought to give up on the idea of running antiquated hardware, you won't find much hand-holding.

>>860361

>you can use a modern computer to cross compile for that 32bit powerpc

No fucking shit niggerbrains, but that defeats the purpose of using a G4 to begin with.

>>860816

I got curious : how ubuntu and other still remaining PPC supporting distros compile their packages? Do they cross compile it on x86 / modern power architecture or do they patiently wait till their faithful 14 years old mac finish their job?

>>860825

I'm sure most people cross compile, but a 14 year old G4/5 would still be faster than a Raspberry Pi.

>>860816

You're happy to use binaries if they're provided by the distribution, but you won't use ones you make on another machine?

yaboot doesn't want to read the kernel off of ext4, do I have to repartition with a ext2 /boot for yaboot to read it?

>>860825

ubuntu dropped ppc, 16.04 is the last version with it.

>>860896

>do I have to repartition with a ext2 /boot for yaboot to read it?

Yes. Rumor has it that ext4 used to work at some point in the past, but I've never seen it myself.

>>860825

There's an unofficial PPC repo for FreeBSD, and it's all compiled on a G5 - I don't trust it much though.

>>860864

>You're happy to use binaries if they're provided by the distribution

There aren't any and even if there were, only if they aren't cross compiled.

>>861079

>paranoid faggots autistically screeching about 80x86 crosscompilers

>still use binaries

>>860935

Damn, I didn't make a separate partition for /boot. I'll just format my swap partition as ext2 and use that I guess.

I saw somewhere you could use grub instead of yaboot. How true is that?

>>861081

>There aren't any

Yet if you'd be happy to use those, why not ones that you compile yourself? Do you think that using modern architecture automatically means nefarious actors are pozing everything you compile, even for a different architecture? If so, count yourself as retarded.

>>859645

My grandma just gave me one that was sitting in her drawer. I'd like to at least get some use out of it.

Does anyone know if these are vulnerable to specter-like attacks?

>>861167

Meltdown is Intel-specific, but spectre works on some of the later G4's and G5's.

>https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/is-powerpc-susceptible-to-spectre-yep.html

>https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html

>>861139

APM partitions don't necessarily have to be in sequential order on disk, and mac-fdisk has the ability to add partitions out of order. You could try taking 256 MB out of your swap partition for use as a boot partition while keeping your remaining swap space.

>grub

I've never tried it, but PowerPC is supported by GRUB2 for the last couple of years and some people do use it.

I reformatted my swap for an ext2 /boot. Now it can load the kernel but it panics because it cant mount /. I compiled it with ext4 support and everything, and yaboot.conf has root set correctly.

>>859557

You sure that isn't your hard drive bottlenecking you?