Hi Sup Forums, i've had a PPC Macintosh in my posession for a while now running MacOS 9. It's pretty comfy but unusable...

Hi Sup Forums, i've had a PPC Macintosh in my posession for a while now running MacOS 9. It's pretty comfy but unusable, since no software exists in this millennium for it. So, it's time to make the switch to another OS. I know a few linux distros and the BSDs make PPC builds but I was wondering what (YOU)r opinion is. What should I install on it? In return, I'll post some pics of its somewhat dusty but pristine innards.

Other urls found in this thread:

macintoshgarden.org
applefritter.com/node/21069
youtube.com/user/Druaga1
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Is it 32 or 64 bit?

>PPC

Not sure. It's labeled as a Power Mac G4.
I believe it's 32 bit.

Oh christ, i can put my fiber optic PCI card in there.
32 and 64 bit PPC existed, but i think apple only made 32bits.

>no software exists in this millennium for it
macintoshgarden.org
If this is your main concern, evaluate OS 9 for a while with something to run on it first before you turn it into a shittier, slower version of your main PC but with less/more outdated packages.

If you still don’t like it and would rather have a *nix environment, OpenBSD is supposedly pretty good on PPC. I don’t bother with it though, I feel like if you’re going to keep a system like that around you might as well use it to run something you can’t run better on any old thrift store Pentium 4/C2D shitbox.
Everything but the G5 is 32-bit.

Thanks for the site. The bare minimum i would need to justify keeping os9 is a ssh client that supports 2.x and a web browser that can render html4 and maybe some basic JS, so hopefully they have some software.

Run your SSH through a gateway machine (even a raspi) that gateways the shitty crypto to non-shitty crypto.

Unironically, Gentoo

Specs? Anything below a dual 800MHz is pretty much unusable even with GNU/Linux. I use a dual 1.33GHz as my main desktop with Leopard and it can even play 1080p just fine using Coreplayer. I also use a 1.42GHz iBook G4 with Debian. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it works perfectly fine once it's done.
That looks like a dual 500 at the very most. Install Tiger and use macports to install a modern version of ssh and use TenFourFox7400 for web browsing. It won't be fast at all though.

how hard is to jerryrig a matx board inside one of those?

G5 was 64-bit

Better not use it to compile anything though. Try cross compiling

>It's unusable
How? It still does everything it did 20 years ago. Plays Marathon, etc.

I've got a 440ghz PowerMac the other day, It's sill on tiger. pretty slow but not unusable. Don't really know if I want to keep it in Tiger, Downgrade to MacOS 9 or install Linux.

Kill yourself

This. My iBook took 14h to compile Firefox 52 ESR.
Was worth it though, it's almost twice as fast than the stock Debian package. Based CFLAGS.

Oh Man, I have one of those. Love it; looks great on a desk with the cinema display and pretty easy to work on. Tons of free software online. Someone already mentioned macgarden, which is the big site for programs and games. TenFourFox and Classilla both work alright, though I only ever had marginal success with web-browsing. These definitely excel as gaming machines. Drop in a Radeon 9000 or equivalent Nvidia (i.e. any high-end card for the time) and you can run @max pretty much anything available on OS9. Dualboot OS9 and OSX is also lots of fun.

Only negative: get familiar with extensions.

The one I have here originally came with one 450Mhz G4, which I upgraded to 2x800Mhz G4. I lose the L3 cache when doing this, but thats fine. 2x800Mhz G4 + Radeon 9000 is a hell of a combo for running shit like MechWarrior 2, Descent, AvP, etc.

tl;dr: 10/10 would recommend Graphite G4.

>which I upgraded to 2x800Mhz G4
From a quicksilver?

G5 was also in aluminum cheese grater case.

Right. Took the CPU daughterboard and heatsink from the Quicksilver. 800x2 daughterboard drops right into the motherboard (G4 "Digital Audio", I believe). But the dual CPUs draw more power, so I connected the 2x800 daughterboard to the 12v out pin of one of an unused Molex connector (for the HDDs) to provide the extra power. There are tons of writeups on how to do this online; for example:

applefritter.com/node/21069

Pretty good. The only purpose for Quicksilvers is scrapping them, using their CPUs in Sawtooths, GbEs or DAs and modding their cases to ATX. Seriously, dealing with those fucking PCI issues, their pickiness about graphics cards and the fact that they only take up to 1.5GiB ram. Fuck Quicksilvers.

Yup, love it
One of the best designs I've seen (inside and out)

bumping for PPC love

>applefritter.com/node/21069
The exoticness of alternative ISA was nice, but then you end up like this - with systems that are hell to upgrade and you have to resort to ghetto methods if you even can do anything.

Ironic, given how you actually spent huge money to get these proprietary, hard to service/upgrade/fix things, ironically. People could have bought a second upgraded PC 5-6 years later on instead if they didn't get these expensive gizmos, and would have been better off.

Viva la x86 self-built liberty.

Another funny thing is how badly has old Mac OS X, not to mention OS 9 aged, compared to Windows XP which is still usable.

That is because Mac OS9 was released in the 90's where Windows XP was released in 2001. It has aged, but you can use Classzilla, a port of FireFox for Mac OS 9. It is best for retro gaming.

What are you talking about?
PCI, DDR and Apples easy API and development tools for porting and developing software, second hand market full of used shit.

You're just cherry picking the mid 2000's when Apple literary pulled the plug. Early 2000's (not even mentioning the 90's) was still very common time for different ISAs, just like we have ARM now.

Okay, you're just a Apple hater, got it.

For XP to be any use as you state here, you have to have at least SP2 (2004) or SP3 (2008), compared to those dates, Tiger and Snow Leopard are still very usable, if not more usable than XP.
Also this Mac OS 9 is more like Windows 9x than NT.

>Okay, you're just a Apple hater, got it.
or maybe windows fanboy?

OS X Leopard is perfectly useable today. You get an up to date browser (TenFourFox) and pretty much all the modern GNU/Linux software thanks to Macports and X11 integration. As an example, the AVCHD codec my camera uses isn't natively supported in the OS, but I used the latest version of ffmpeg to convert it to ProRes 422. Sure, it took three hours to convert a 30 minute 1080p video on my dual 1.33GHz G4, but that's because I'm paranoid about having a Powermac G5 break on me. G5s are cheaper than G4s these days, and thankfully I'll be getting a free XServe G5 on wednesday.

>exoticness
for most of the time PowerPC was a thing, x86 was just as "exotic" , kid

>What are you talking about?
I'm talking about hardware, not software. For example the expensive proprietary PSUs that make it a real PITA to keep the machine running. With standard PC, you just find another ATX unit and it's compatible.

PPC was used in Apple and an offshoot in consoles. x86 in every other computer including servers, by mid-2000s. I don't think there is a discussion possible about one being more fringe. Not that that fringe automatically meant bad.

By mid 2000's yes, nobody is arguing about that
and PPC was not just used by Apple and consoles

In any case the best timeline is one where Motorola 68000 ISA prevailed and became the de facto thing, and instead of being replaced by powerpc, Motorola took it successfully through the superscalar, out-of-order revolution and clock scaling in the late 1990s and early 2000s all the way to the multicore era.

And AMD, Cyrix, IBM and companies like Rise ended up making 68k clones and keep the competition going.

Yeah, I was speaking about these powermacs mainly. I know one guy who runs it because he likes the brownie points, but the replacement parts are expensive if it isn't stuff like HDD or VGA card that is standard.

PowerPC was ahead of x86 for the bigger part of the 90's. Deal with it.

That's just Apple with their own ecosystem. We still have that shit with x86 Apple computers.
Compare to Amiga, Apple II or even the C64, every computer shop had a power brick for them for sale if you needed a new one.

m68k really hit a wall at the time, it was much easier to start with POWER all over again
POWER was not bad at all compared to m68k at the time, specially in progression

>Deal with it.
I don't feel the need to deal with anything, it's possible. (Crossplatfom benchmarking is always a misleading thing though and if you only base your idea on Apple ads, then naturally it is goig to be skewed. Of course, Intel didn't need to run ads where they would trash PowerPC with cherrypicked numbers).

In any case, once the out-of-order x86 architectures took of on high clocks (Pentium II/III, AMD K7), they couldn't keep up. Smaller ecosystem made it unfair but that's how it was.

>Compare to Amiga, Apple II or even the C64, every computer shop had a power brick for them for sale if you needed a new one
Yeah, which is why I really like the beige box, although it isn't so extravagant machine to own.

Intel didn't win because it was good.
Even when PowerPC development was pretty much at a halt and Apple switched to Intel.

Same for PC in general.

Well in 2005 AMD was better. But after that, Intel was at least top notch, at the very least.

That's mostly the point when the big Power cores became the only thing that could compete in high performance (until Zen). They did it at the cost of much higher complexity, chip sizes, power consumption and prices tho, so question is if it counts.

and I mean the IBM Power for servers, not PowerPC.

>Well in 2005 AMD was better.
Yeah, but Q1 2006 the Core came out and AMD went back on the back seat

FreeBSD or Debian

Check this guy out.

youtube.com/user/Druaga1

>not writing your own software

>not building your own hardware for your own software

this

OpenBSD.

This

these