What's the state of Linux and BSD on PowerPC Macs? I have an iBook G4 and I'm hoping to get some use out of it

And a more than doubled clock speed.

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

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.

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.

If your going to go gentoo then dont forget something like

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

Ah, thanks. I would have missed that.

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

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

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.

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.

Pretty comfy

Why would you run outdated Firefox tho?

Do you still have to disable KMS?

Why are you running as root?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

you can use distcc with portage

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.
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/.

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.

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

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.

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.

Its got a radeon card, not nvidia

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.

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

You deserve it for using proprietary software.

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

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

kek fucking newfag millennials

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

>>>/reddit/
>>>Holla Forums

Why don't you shills just post

Kek, that was a funny post

This is why this board needs IDs.

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.

Oh boy this meme don't look forced at all.

I agree, there are spammers on /g/ too. It's fucking ridiculous. It's like they're trying to get the boards to deliberately fight each other.

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

...

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?

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.

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?

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

>tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/is-powerpc-susceptible-to-spectre-yep.html
>tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html

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.
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.

bump

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