A Power Macintosh G4/450 falls into my lap

The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the mid-'80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building.

The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware.

The paper's design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors.

Some of them are still in service, but mostly we use Windows PCs now.

Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one ... until they were all gone.

I put in my request immediately, and soon I had a hard-drive-less G4/450 MHz box with 128 MB of RAM, plus that huge monitor, at my not-so-clean desk.

Most of my crap is packed for the move. I haven't packed two file drawers filled with old hardware. So I pulled a 14.4 GB IDE hard drive out of the drawer, plugged it in to the first cables I could find (it's just dangling in the box, not even mounted), and found the first PowerPC CD I could find.

It was Xubuntu 7.10. It booted, but was extremely slow and didn't look installable with only 128 MB of RAM.

So I downloaded a fresh ISO of Debian Etch (4.0r4) for PowerPC and did an install.

I did the "standard" install first, without a network mirror, just to see if the thing would boot after it was done. There was a message during the install about not finding a Mac boot partition, but once I said that no, I didn't need it, the install went forward and I rebooted into a Debian GNU/Linux console.

I think the message about a Mac boot partition had something to do with installing Linux on a hard drive that already contains Mac OS, and since this drive did not, the Debian installer took care of making the drive bootable.

The next install, for which I chose the "desktop" set of packages, went perfectly. I entered the LaCie monitor's native resolution (I think it was 1600x1200; I Googled it at the time), and I had a perfect Debian Etch desktop in about a half-hour.

I've been wanting to get a new desktop box for awhile (I've been shopping in my price range, which is free to $25), and it's funny how this thing pretty much dropped in my lap.

Next things to do: Clean out the interior, which is Addams-Family dusty, put that hard drive in a bay, and add some RAM (I have a 512 MB PC-100 module that I really hope works; otherwise I have 256 MB and 128 MB and 64 MB and 32 MB modules ... I've got a lot of old memory).

So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM?

Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly. I figured that if any platform would be no trouble for a PowerPC distro, it would be the Mac G4. And it appears that I was right.

I could (and very well might) test this thing out with OpenBSD, NetBSD, Fedora, or even Slackintosh.

More than likely, I'll stick with Etch or try it instead with Lenny.