The Debian Mac needs more memory
I've taken to calling my Power Macintosh G4/466 the Debian Mac.
I continue to be amazed at how well Debian Etch runs on this thing with 466 MHz of PowerPC CPU and a smallish 128 MB of RAM. (I'll take this opportunity to repeat that on this box, Etch runs many a ring around Fedora 9's PowerPC port).
The best thing I could do for the usability of this box is to up the RAM. It'd be nice to have 512 MB of RAM in here. The box will take up to 1.5 GB, but I have yet to find any PC-133 RAM sticks in my possession that will work.
I had a sweet 512 MB module that, in all fairness, I've never been able to test, and it didn't work in the G4. I had a bunch of smaller modules (32 MB to 128 MB), none of which worked either.
There's a lone 256 MB module in my VIA test box that I might try, but I probably will be reduced to going on eBay and looking for SIMMs that somebody pulled from an existing Mac.
With the huge 22-inch LaCie electron22blue II monitor and, with Debian Etch, a very well-matched OS, this is a really nice box to work on.
If I didn't mention it before (and I know I did), the biggest impediment in using Linux or BSD with a PowerPC-based machine is the lack of Flash support. Since Flash is so insidious and must be written for your exact CPU, which it taxes greatly, by the way, there is a Flash plugin for Mac OS on PowerPC, for Linux on i386, but not for Linux (or OpenBSD) on PowerPC.
You can get around the Flash problem in OpenBSD on i386 by using a Linux browser (I use Opera for that purpose) and OpenBSD's excellent Linux compatibility feature, but there's no easy way to play Flash content in Linux on PowerPC.
I installed swf-dec, but that has yet to do one Flash-y thing for me.
Gnash might work in some situations for PowerPC Linux — and it pretty much represents our only hope for this platform — but it is not part of the Etch distribution, and I'm not desperate enough to backport it.
Actually, if I was convinced that Gnash would work, I'd upgrade to Lenny immediately. But I'd miss a) the stability and b) not having to install 100 updates a week in Etch (like I seem to do on my Lenny laptop).
Coming up: I add a backup drive to the Debian Mac — and create a very simple shell script to facilitate the backups we all should be making ... but only after I fail once again at installing OpenBSD.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I think there has to be something screwy in my system BIOS on my PowerMac, because I seem to be getting the same errors in all of my disks. The boot manager comes up, it goes to the basic installer, and then I am caught in frozen partitioner hell. I'd consider it being my disk drive I burn DVD's on, but I've used live-DVDs on PC burned on the same drive. Perhaps my Mac has something against DVDs... Unless I can get Linux or BSD on it, I might get rid of it. I'm psyched to try my latest acquisition out, a 133Mhz Pentium with 64MB SIMM memory. I want to try DSL, Milax and Deli on it. If it doesn't work, I saw some AMD K-6's on ebay for $2 (luckily its a socket 7). Linux: the best excuse to keep your home filled with dusty hardware.
I'd love to see how OpenBSD does on this hardware, but I just can't seem to get the drive to boot after the install.
Debian seems "tailored" to this platform, so I'm happy to use it and to have, as I do now, two drives in the box, one for the system itself, the other for backups (with the setup detailed in a near-future post).