Recently in Power Macintosh G4/450 Category

I've been contemplating an installation of Mac's OS X operating system on my old Power Macintosh G4/466 (466 MHz PowerPC CPU, currently 384 MB of RAM but a maximum of 1.5 GB on the motherboard).

That circa 2000/01 machine has been very happily running the PowerPC build of Debian Etch Linux for quite awhile now. But to truly be a work machine for what I do, I need to have Flash capability, and that's something that just isn't easy to do (and do well) on a PowerPC system not running OS X.

It's the tyranny of Flash as the predominant video format over the Internet. Flash is a proprietary system that is wholly controlled by Adobe, and both the apps that make Flash as well as those that display it are tightly controlled by this single company.

And while Adobe appears happy to code Flash players for Intel-based Linux, it is not so happy to do the same for other architectures in Linux (including PowerPC) as well as for other Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD (which uses the Linux version to some degree of success, as does OpenBSD, but in both cases on i386 only and not on PowerPC, which is what I'm aiming for).

I'm already running OS X on our iBook G4 laptop, and I figured that a "backup" OS X machine wouldn't be a bad idea all the way around.

I left the Debian Etch drives in the G4 (there is space for three drives on the bottom of the box, and I have one Debian "root" drive and another devoted to backups) but unplugged them and added a 40 GB IDE hard drive I pulled from a dying Compaq desktop a while back.

Once I figured out with the help of my Mac guru (and fellow LADN online worker) Tom Gapen that the OS X installer wouldn't even recognize my new/old hard drive until I used Apple's Disk Utility to put an OS X-recognized volume on it, I was able to continue beyond the first few screens of the install process.

Even then, I had to create the HFS+ volume in the Disk Utility and reboot before the installer would allow me to actually begin the installation.

Since this Mac is so comparatively old, it doesn't have an internal DVD drive. Being CD only, I used my OS X 10.3 discs to install the system. I figure I'd try later to hook up a Firewire DVD drive and upgrade to 10.4.

Once I had the disk-volume issue out of the way, I just let the installer run. The first thing it does is painstakingly check the first of two CDs for errors. Probably not a bad thing, but time-consuming.

I just let the installer run as I did other things, changed discs when needed, and then entered the barest of personal information when the system asked for it to make the first user account.

So I now have a relatively old Macintosh G4 with a single 466 MHz processor (we still have a few dual-500 MHz G4s in service at the Daily News; they run well with OS X 10.4) probably not quite enough memory at 384 MB, but a spare 256 MB module that I'll stuff in there as soon as I can (and the hope that I can scare up one or more 512 MB PC100 or PC133 modules to build it out).

I don't have the box connected to the Internet yet, and I'll have to load some software — especially the Firefox Web browser — in addition to first patching the OS X 10.3 installation and then upgrading to 10.4 and patching that ...

And if I can get networking into the box (I'm thinking either powerline networking or stringing some CAT5e from the home network to the box, which is far away from said home network), I will hopefully have a somewhat serviceable OS X machine on which to do work at home.

And if it doesn't work out, I can just unplug the OS X drive, replug in the Debian drives, update the Etch installation to Lenny and return to all the goodness that Linux has brought to this box in the recent past.

I've been writing updates in my print column of the things I've bought/used/discarded/loved/hated over the past year, and that got me thinking: I got started with Linux in early 2007 and used many a distro on the machines available to me.

But for the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this:

1) I've found stuff that works

2) see 1)

OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Anyhow, the other reason I've kept the same operating systems on my half-dozen or so active computers is that I need them to run — and run well. And they do.

Here's the rundown:

On my main laptop, the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 for nearly six months. The only "sticking" point is not having Flash 9 or 10. Flash 7 works for YouTube but not much else. I have a few things that I do that need more up-to-date Flash, but otherwise the OS and applications in packages and ports have been extremely stable. I just upgraded it from Firefox 2 to 3, and tonight I added Mplayer and successfully played a Quicktime video. (Too bad the sound chip on the Toshiba is broken; the video itself looked great.)

If OpenBSD weren't so good, I'd use the Flash situation as a excuse to run back to Linux. But I've enjoyed using OpenBSD and learned so much over these months that for now I'm going to stick with it.

I have an identical Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It, too, is performing very well, although I seldom use it since I have all of my data on the OpenBSD laptop. I have few complaints about Ubuntu 8.04, and before it came out I vowed to stick with the LTS for at least a year, maybe longer. I could be persuaded to upgrade if I needed to get a newer wireless adapter to work, but so far I haven't needed to do that. Ubuntu remains very solid, and with better Flash support than OpenBSD it's nice to have it as a backup.

Our daughter has what used to be known as the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450. The Gateway could never comfortably run OpenBSD because of its noisy CPU fan, which Linux can manage most of the time (with a simple shell script). FreeBSD managed the fan even better, but only during the first boot after the install. After that, it all went to hell.

Our girl has all her educational games on the Gateway, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04. I still think that the Debian Project packages Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint just that much better than Ubuntu, but all the problems I had with Debian Lenny and X on both the Gateway and later the Toshiba had me running back to Ubuntu and OpenBSD — both of which run X perfectly on both laptops with no xorg.conf file needed.

I'll concede that installing, customizing and maintaining just about any Linux distro is easier than doing the same in OpenBSD, but as I say above, I'm grateful for the learning experience and most of the time can figure out how to do what needs to be done in OpenBSD.

My Self-Reliant Thin Client, the first test machine that I began running Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, ZenWalk, Puppy, DSL and other distros on in 2007 has been running Debian Etch on a bootable 8 GB CF card for quite a few months now. I don't have it networked at the moment, so I can't upgrade to Lenny. I'm keeping the converted thin client powered on these days in another informal long-term test, and I hope to have networking hooked up to it soon. With 128 MB of RAM and less-than-great video and sound hardware, it's not the greatest machine, but I love having something with no moving parts and minimal power consumption.

I have the Mac G4/466, aka the Debian Mac, running Debian Etch, which I continue to think is the best non-OS X operating system for this particular hunk of hardware. I managed to get 640 MB of RAM into it, and it's a great machine. Since it's a PowerPC box, there's no Flash Player in any OS that isn't OS X. I'm considering an OS X 10.4 install to see how that runs. We have dual-500 MHz G4s in the office that run OS X really, really well. I wonder how this single-CPU 466 MHz box will measure up. We could use a Mac OS backup machine in the house.

Earlier this week, I pulled out the $15 Laptop, a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz CPU and 144 MB RAM and fixed what was ailing it: It wouldn't run X in OpenBSD 4.2 in my user account, but would in root. That's because when it comes to screwing around with X, I don't know what I'm doing some of the time. I had created an .xinitrc file with a single line reading "xset b off" to silence the system bell in X, and that was enough to keep the Fvwm window manager from loading. I killed .xinitrc and all was well with the Compaq. I'll probably do a reinstall of OpenBSD, since upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 to ... is just too much work. Yep, after a long search for the right OS, the Compaq has run OpenBSD for a long, long time.

The real workhorse of our stable is the iBook G4 1 GHz laptop. In the past year I've replaced the hard drive, pumped 1 GB of memory into it and upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4. We needed 10.4 in order to run Firefox 3 and Flash 10. Yep, that's when I upgrade — only when absolutely necessary.

To make a long story short, until I have a burning desire to watch Web video all the time, or until I need to edit and process video into Flash, I just might stick with OpenBSD on my i386 hardware. Otherwise I'll probably move back to Ubuntu or Debian, the latter only if those nagging video problems somehow go away. (I've had similar issues with Slackware ...).

My next "challenge" will be to run OpenBSD -current instead of -release. Since I already hate waiting for things to compile, I don't know how I'll react to keeping a -current installation up to date. There's only one way to find out.

I had no expectation that it would work, but I decided to shove my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA 802.11b wireless networking card into the meant-for-Airport-only slot in my Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch.

I had never heard that this sort of thing would work.

I shoved the card it. It's quite a bit longer than the pricey Airport card, which I've seen go for near $100 on eBay.

The Mac's antenna plug matched. I connected the antenna wire.

I booted Debian. I opened the Desktop -- Administration -- Networking tool.

There it was, eth2, my wireless card.

I configured it for DHCP. It found a network. I now had wireless networking on a Power Macintosh G4 under Debian without having to buy a thing.

One problem: Since the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver card is quite a bit longer than the Airport card this slot was meant for, there's no way I can even close the case of the G4 while using the Wi-Fi card.

That's a bit of a dilemma, no?

Maybe a PCI card will work better? I wonder what might work ... and if I'll have to upgrade to Lenny to increase my chances of this actually working.

But wireless in Linux on a G4. Amazing.

I haven't booted the Power Mac G4/466 running Debian Etch in a while, but I did so today because I'm about to move the box and its massive LaCie electron22blue monitor. So I wanted to power it up, do a software update and get it on the cart.

This is a nice box on which to run Debian. I've complained at length at how poorly Fedora 9 installed and autoconfigured on this box and how startlingly better Debian Etch did with that same task. Sorry to repeat that, but it bears repeating.

Since I've set up this box, I've discovered both an original set of PowerPC G4 Macintosh install CDs, which I suspect are OS 9, with a slew of equally original discs for Classic Mac applications, everything from Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator to MS Office.

I'm not about to install Mac OS (but at least I'd get Flash support from Adobe, which sees some kind of screwed-up wisdom in supporting the all-but-dead PowerPC OS 9 but not PowerPC Linux, which isn't exactly a front-burner OS but at least is currently supported and would get more use if Flash and a modern version of Java ran on it).

I suppose I'd consider throwing OS 9 or OS X on this box, but with Debian running great, I just don't see it happening.

I had trouble when I tried to install OpenBSD on this PowerPC box, but now I think I have a handle on how to get it to boot:

If I'm not wrong, I can make the disk bootable with:

# fdisk -u wd0

On a not-totally-unrelated, our photo-department systems guru Roger Vargo keeps Macintoshes of many vintages and OSes running as well as I've ever seen them, and he's got a handful of Power Mac G4s running OS 9.

I was surprised recently to see a G4 running OS X 10.4 and doing it very quickly. The last G4 I saw running OS X before this was a total disaster, with any action on the user's part taking many seconds to even begin taking effect.

But this G4 was as fast as you'd want it to be.

It did have dual CPUs — maybe 400 MHz each — and at least 1 GB of RAM. Yep, you can stuff those G4's with up to 1.5 GB, I believe. It screams fairly well in OS X. Could you imagine getting near 1 GHz of CPU and 1 GB of RAM on the PowerPC platform in Debian, OpenBSD (and at that level, maybe even in Fedora)?

And they tend to have DVD-ROM/CD-R drives, plus gigabit Ethernet built it. Apple had gigabit Ethernet in the late '90s? Yep, it seems they did.

And the ATI video card built into my G4 does a great job with this huge, hefty LaCie monitor. The generic onboard video circuitry in my el-cheapo Maxspeed Maxterm thin client delivers a much fainter image on the same CRT monitor (and didn't do well at all when I hooked it up to an LCD monitor an age ago). But this G4 delivers superb graphics in Debian.

In other words, if you have a G4 or G5 at your disposal (and Flash isn't important to you or what you do), you might want to go off the reservation and try GNU/Linux or one of the BSD projects on it. (NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD all maintain PowerPC ports).

As it is, I can see this G4 being my main home box in our office, should we ever get all the accumulated junk removed enough to return the space to genuine office use. I kind of, sort of need Flash, but it's not a total deal-breaker.

I can only hope that upgrading the G4 from Etch to Lenny keeps all of the Debian goodness I've been enjoying so much. And there's always that next install of OpenBSD.

Endnote: Since we're not allowed to keep boxes (computer or otherwise) on the floor at the Daily News' new digs, I've had a desk packed with boxes (computer and otherwise) ever since we moved here. I hate to take the G4 down, but right now the G4 case has served me better as a Post-It bulletin board than as a working computer, and I hope to somehow rectify that with this change of CPU scenery.

And this: I'd love to try Slackintosh, the Slackware port to PowerPC, on this box.

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

I've been running Debian in one form or another, on one box or another, ever since Etch went stable in April 2007.

Lately most of my work in Debian has been on my Gateway laptop (aka The $0 Laptop), which from a hardware standpoint responds better to Lenny (Testing) than to Etch (Stable), so I'd been using Lenny about 100 percent of the time until I got what I'm calling The Debian Mac, a Power Macintosh G4/466, in a mass giveaway of old Apple hardware.

I tried a Xubuntu live CD, but once I burned a Debian PowerPC image and installed Etch, I knew that this chunk of hardware — especially the ATI video card and LaCie 22-inch monitor — responded to the distro extremely well.

I last ran Etch extensively both on my VIA converted thin client and on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), but since then the VIA has been used to compare Ubuntu and Wolvix, and the Compaq has been running OpenBSD and Puppy.

So it had been a long time since I had worked with Etch.

It really is like a comfortable pair of old shoes.

On the Mac, anyway, everything works perfectly. I didn't have to do anything beyond enter my LaCie electron22blue II monitor's native resolution (1600x1200) when prompted during automatic X configuration while the install was running.

Sure there are a lot of old packages in Etch: OpenOffice 2.0, Gaim instead of Pidgin, Firefox 2 instead of 3.

But again, everything works, and I could really get used to not having to wait for dozens or hundreds of new packages to download and install every week, like I do when running Lenny.

Eventually Lenny will be as old-shoeish as Etch is now, with the rush of revised packages slowing to a familiar trickle, and with the whole system working as well as it ever will (and hopefully that will be well enough.

I already see this process happening in my Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy install on the Gateway, where everything is settling in (and where I recently did a reinstall after what I suspect were UUID conflicts after I monkeyed around with the partitions more than one too many times).

I'll be hoping that for the next 2 1/2 years, the Canonical team can give the same quality of attention to security and bug-patching in 8.04 — the distro's second "long-term support" release — as the Debian Project does for its Stable release and Red Hat does for its RHEL products.

I kind of, sort of planned to remain with Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop for at least two of the three years for which it will receive support, especially now that I'm continuing to have problems with X in Lenny on that machine that I can't seem to solve. The same problems don't occur in Etch on the laptop, but there are so many things that Lenny does bring to that particular platform that rolling back to Etch isn't an option.

Also, I see using more desktop machines, as opposed to laptops, in my near future, and that breaks things wide open, since the ACPI problems I have with laptops and FOSS operating systems aren't nearly as much of a factor on desktops, where CPU fans generally run all the time and I don't care about suspend/resume.

It's been suggested that I try Slackintosh — an unofficial port of Slackware to the PowerPC — on the G4. That's intriguing. I've always found that KDE runs quicker in Slackware than in any other Linux distribution. KDE probably runs about as fast in Debian, and I could add that desktop (as well as Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm, or what have you) to this Etch install.

In my experience, it's easier and better to run a given distribution with its "main" window manager: Debian and Ubuntu with GNOME, Slackware and Mandriva with KDE, etc. Everything seems to "fit" better and work better, too.

I do appreciate that things like the GNOME NetworkManager and Synaptic Package Manager appear across the Ubuntu offshoots (Kubuntu, Xubuntu), unifying the experience somewhat. Going into the KDE version of Debian and using whatever it is that KDE uses to update packages, or into the Xfce version and relying on Aptitude (not a bad alternative; I use and appreciate Aptitude more and more these days) is a bit jarring, and I credit the Ubuntu developers for maintaining a core of helpful applications across their different distros.

And as I've said many times, both GNOME and Debian take a lot of bashing out there in blogland, but I've found GNOME to be extremely fast and quite capable of doing what I want to do, and in tests between Debian and Slackware (running Xfce and Fluxbox), Debian more than holds its own in terms of speed on the desktop.

Not that I wouldn't or won't run Slackware in the future. The fact that Patrick Volkerding and crew seem to maintain Slackware's various versions for years and years says a lot for how long you can safely run it. I don't know if that same longetivity applies to running Slackintosh; I suppose it depends on how many of the packages come from Slackintosh and how many come from Slackware.

But it's hard to argue with "Debian just works." When Lenny goes from Testing status to Stable, Etch will become what Debian calls "Old Stable," and receive security patches for another year. That gives those of us running it — on the desktop, the server, in embedded systems, etc. — ample time to figure out what to do next.

This being a Linux PowerPC box, I wonder how long I'll be happy without the ability to run Flash (which Adobe doesn't code for Linux on this platform; guess I could always dual boot Linux and OS X if I really, really need Flash. Or I could just give up on PowerPC and run i386. I have a promising Pentium 4 machine that ideally will be my next OS test bed, replacing the VIA converted thin client that has spawned dozens of reviews and hundreds of blog posts since I began writing this particular brand of blather at the beginning of 2007.

Taking another tangential trip in this already-too-tangential entry, it's tempting to try each and every new distro, to write a quickie review and reap the substantial boost in traffic that one gets from links in places like Distrowatch.

Truth be told, I've exposed my family to Linux quite a bit. When our iBook was awaiting the 3-hour operation to replace its ailing hard drive, I had a laptop set up dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 and Debian Lenny (before Lenny's X problem surfaced). My wife prefers Ubuntu, and my daughter prefers Debian, if only because I have her Lenny account set up to quickly access her favorite educational games, which run that much better in Debian (the main difference being that launching TuxPaint through GCompris in Ubuntu results in a lack of the usual sound effects, which return when starting TuxPaint by itself, or starting the program either way in Debian.

And with the Mac's giant, wonderfully-clear monitor, I can see getting a whole lot of work done on this G4. With its 466 MHz CPU, it's not as fast as the 1+ GHz machines I seem to have in abundance, but for a hack writer, it's plenty fast.

And with a drive inside the box set up for and dedicated to backups (something I could do in any i386 desktop box with a case of sufficient capacity), a solid if unsexy distro (Etch), I could get a lot done if I manage not to screw the whole thing up.

(I'm not saying I won't try again to install OpenBSD and actually get it to boot, but it'll be on a different drive so I can preserve this Debian goodness. If I can dual-boot both systems, I will, but it doesn't look good at present.)

All that means is that I won't be dist-upgrading this Mac anytime soon from Etch to Lenny, even if the latter actually goes Stable, as scheduled, some time this month. I might try a cautious test of Lenny on a separate hard drive, or I might hold onto Etch with my cold, dying fingers until the last possible moment.

But like many, it only takes a little promise of something better to change my mind. If Gnash would play Flash video with any kind of consistency, I'd jump this box to Lenny in a second. If Gnash gets that good, will somebody let me know?

The answer is yes: Tripling the memory on a Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch makes a dramatic difference in the responsiveness of the system.

It makes the system way, way more usable, cutting down on swapping tremendously and boosting free memory, also tremendously, when doing normal desktop tasks.

Since the Power Macintosh G4/466 has enough space for four hard drives, I decided to put a second one in the box.

I originally planned to dual-boot Debian Etch and OpenBSD, but I still can't get the system to even boot OpenBSD after an install, so I abandoned that plan. After two successful OpenBSD installs on i386, I figured I could handle a MacPPC install, but it was not to be.

And since Debian Etch installs — and runs — so well, I'm keeping it.

Before the last unsuccessful OpenBSD install, I set the second drive's jumpers to make it a "slave." Then I used an extra IDE cable as an "extension cable" so I could plug the second IDE input from the too-short motherboard cable into the second drive.

I'm pretty accustomed to chaining IDE cables together for longer runs — I did it for over a year with my VIA thin client.

Anyway, I booted into Debian Etch, ran the GNOME Partition Editor to create an ext3 filesystem on the backup drive, then mounted it and did a few tests with rsync.

Yep, I'm using rsync to do the backups. I first learned about it in Carla Schroder's great "Linux Cookbook" (which all of you should own ... and which O'Reilly should beg Carla and pay her well to revise immediately).

Rsync is in the default Ubuntu install, but in Debian Etch, you have to add it:

# aptitude install rsync

In order to use the backup drive, I created a directory called hdb1 in /media and used it to mount the drive:

# mkdir /media/hdb1

Instead of mounting it from the command line, I put a line in /etc/fstab.

Here's what /etc/fstab looks like on this machine:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda4 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

I made a directory called homebackup on /media/hdb1, which is where my backups of /home will go:

# mkdir /media/hdb1/homebackup

To run the backup from the command line, here's what I did (at a root prompt):

# rsync -av --delete /home /media/hdb1/homebackup

(A note on rsync: The FIRST time I ran rsync with the line above, a home directory was created in /media/hdb1/homebackup. Subsequent uses of the same rsync command just update the directory; they don't create it again.)

The beauty of rsync: I really didn't explain rsync all that well. Basically, it's a great backup utility that, when used multiple times, only backs up the changes between the source and the destination directories.

What the switches mean in rsync -av --delete:

-a stands for archive mode. It is a catch-all switch that turns on a variety of things in rsync, most of which I don't understand. I use all of these switches because Carla Schroder told me to. For more (or less) clarity, check out the man page for rsync.

-v stands for verbose so rsync outputs to the console exactly what it's doing.

--delete tells rsync to delete files in the destination directory that have been previously deleted from the source directory. Without this switch, the backup directory would just get bigger and bigger. You might want that; without --delete, everything you delete would still be in the backup directory. But I don't, so I'm using this switch.

in order not to have to remember to type my entire rsync command with the switches and the directory information, I put it in a very simple shell script in /usr/local/bin.

I called the shell script backup — can't forget that.

Here's what is in the /usr/local/bin/backup file:

#!/bin/bash

# This file backs up the /home partition to the secondary drive with rsync
rsync -av --delete /home /media/hdb1/homebackup

To make the file executable, I ran:

# chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/backup

I'm not a big fan of using su to root, so I added my user account to the sudoers file (after I su'd to root):

# visudo

When you invoke visudo from a root prompt, the system opens the sudoers file with the default editor. Usually that editor is vi, but in Debian, the default editor, as configured, is nano. I've been using vi a lot lately in OpenBSD (with the i386 systems on which I can actually successfully install it). But for me it's easier to use nano, with it's F3 to save, CTRL-x to exit, and just moving the cursor around with arrow keys and not having to worry about going from command mode to insert mode as in vi.

Now that my little vi rant is over, here's what I did in the sudoers file after visudo brought it up in nano:

I gave my user account the same privileges as root. I wouldn't do this for other users; I'd figure out how to more finely grain the permissions, which is what sudo is really good at. But I'm not running a huge multiuser box, so giving my user account those privileges is good enough for now.

Here's what the relevant section of the sudoers file looks like:

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
steven ALL=(ALL) ALL

Back to the backups: This script will run without sudo or su privileges, but the --delete switch will not work because the non-root user doesn't have privileges in the lost+found directory in /home. So if you want to back up the entire /home directory, including all the files for all users, you should run it this way:

$ sudo backup

or after su to root:

# backup

Of course, if you want to set this up for your individual users, you can rewrite the rsync line to only back up their own /home files:

rsync -av --delete /home/steven /media/hdb1/homebackup

Then they could run it from a regular prompt, without root privileges, and it will work.

Since I'm the only user of this box, I made the rsync command cover the entire /home folder, which means, for me, using sudo to make it work.

What about a cron job? Sure, you could do this as a cron job, but I'm not in the habit of leaving the box on all the time, so cron (or even anacron) doesn't fit in with my computing habits. I guess anacron, which runs jobs after a certain interval of time has passed (and not only at certain, specified times), would work, but I'd rather just run the shell script periodically and see the jobs scroll down my terminal window.

But like anything in Unix, there's more than one way to skin any given cat.

Ubuntu note: In Debian, the "main" user does not automatically have sudo privileges. But in Ubuntu, that user does have sudo ability. You don't have to use visudo at all for that user; just use sudo from the get-go. I'm not sure about subesequent users in Ubuntu, but I sure hope they don't have sudo privileges by default; I think they don't but I don't have a Ubuntu box handy to check.

The trade-off for Ubuntu users is that they can't su to root. Well, they can ... Ubuntu encourages you to use sudo, but you can get a root shell this way:

$ sudo su

After you type in your password, you will have a root prompt:

#

As I said, I'm not a fan of using su to root, and I'd rather use sudo, but there are some things that sudo can't do, and that's when the Ubuntu su trick is necessary. I'd like to thank whoever it is who passed that one along to me.

Conclusion: If you hae a place to back up your files, using rsync is a great way to make those backups. Rsync also excels at backups over SSH, which Carla Schroder goes into in great detail in her book. She also shows you how to set up an rsync server.

Just buy the book already, will ya?

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.

To get sound to come out of the front speaker — which isn't the default, by they way — on the Power Mac G4 (mine is a 466 MHz) while using Debian Etch, open a terminal.

run alsamixer:

$ alsamixer

Arrow over to PC Speak and type m to unmute the speaker. Use the left and right arrows to navigate and the up and down arrows to adjust the levels of Master, Bass, Treble and PCM as you wish. It helps to have some audio playing while you do this so you can hear the effects of your changes.

When you're done, hit esc to exit alsamixer.

Then, still at a prompt in the terminal, you must save your settings:

$ alsactl store

My settings still weren't saved when I rebooted, so I used su to become root and put the following line in /etc/rc.local:

alsactl restore

Once I modified /etc/rc.local, I could reboot and have the sound coming out of my front speaker without having to go into alsamixer every time.

It's a bit hacky, but whatever works, right?

When we left off, Fedora was taking quite a long time to install over the network on this Power Mac G4/466.

I returned to the office to find the Fedora 9 install finished. I rebooted.

No X.

After Debian Etch installed with no problems whatsoever, I don't know why I expected Fedora 9 to do the same thing, but I did.

I didn't think to save the xorg.conf from Debian to help me configure X in Fedora. I thought, if they can't autoconfigure X on a Power Macintosh G4, which likely represents a huge chunk of all PowerPC machines that might try to run Fedora, what can they autoconfigure?

I found some of the information I needed online, and I was able to get X to work with 1024 x768 resolution.

I didn't take the extra time needed to flesh out the meager xorg.conf to get my monitor's native 1600x1200 resolution.

Why?

Fedora 9 was really choking on the G4/466. Yes, the 466 stands for 466 MHz. And yes, I only have 128 MB of RAM.

But Debian ran so comparatively well, I couldn't see staying with Fedora longer than the half-hour it took me to finally get X to work.

In Fedora, everything was slow. Getting menus to open, apps to start.

Before I reinstalled Debian Etch — which I did do, by the way — I tried to install OpenBSD 4.3.

The OpenBSD instructions for MacPPC were less than stellar. It's pretty much just a rambling supplement to the i386 instructions in the FAQ.

I went through the install, but when it came time to boot from the hard drive, that didn't happen.

Otherwise, it was a typical OpenBSD install, whatever that means. I must've neglected to make the proper partition bootable.

I'll have to study both the regular FAQ and the MacPPC instructions and see what I did wrong.

Part of this is a lack of understanding on my part regarding how the Mac boots, i.e. with yaboot and not the i386 bootloaders GRUB and LILO.

I could install OpenBSD on the same drive as Debian, or I could swap in another drive. I don't think I'm confident enough to dual-boot OpenBSD as yet.

Anyhow, I wanted to actually use the box, so I reinstalled Debian Etch, and once again everything works perfectly and acceptably fast. Not super-speedy fast, but remember, this is a 466 MHz/128 MB box. If I could somehow find a couple of memory sticks that would work in this thing, I'm sure I could improve the performance immensely.

And I'm not giving up on the OpenBSD install, either. I don't know how well OpenBSD will run on this box, but I really need to find out. I could always throw NetBSD or FreeBSD on it; both have PowerPC ports.

Huge stopper for PowerPC: I never thought about it before, but I'm sure thinking about it now: There is no Flash player for Linux (or any BSDs, for that matter) on PowerPC.

I tried swfdec, but I have yet to find a single thing it will work with.

Gnash is not in the Etch repositories (although it's probably in Backports), but it is in Lenny. I've never previously gotten it to work, but maybe it's getting better. That's a potential solution for Linux and OpenBSD.

In my shop we work with Flash quite a bit. I'm going to leave this loveliness right now and go to a Mac to create something in Flash. The fact that Flash is resource-heavy, doesn't run on all platforms and is basically a pain in the ass doesn't appear on the radar of most people.

Getting some kind of open-source player, whether it be Gnash or something else, is essential if Flash is going to continue dominating the online video space. Having a way of creating Flash in open source is another thing that we sorely need.

If Sun figured out that we all need the tools to create and run Java, maybe Adobe will eventually feel the same way about Flash. I'm not holding my breath.

Back to the box: So I'm running Debian Etch again, and it's quite a testament to everybody behind Debian that it runs so much better on this hardware than Fedora.

This box is a pretty good candidate for Lenny. I don't know if I'll do an upgrade yet because I'm getting tired of having to constantly download and install so many new packages every few days on my Lenny laptop. If Etch ran better on that Gateway, I'd be using it, but it doesn't.

I have a good feeling about Lenny and this G4, but I'm going to wait until it goes stable, and then maybe wait some more, before doing an upgrade.

I didn't have any complaints about the way Debian Etch performed on my new/old Power Macintosh G4/466. The install went smoothly, the system performed better than I had reason to expect with only 128 MB of RAM, and I can unreservedly recommend Etch to anybody with a box of this pedigree (PowerPC) and vintage (circa 2001).

But since this was my first PowerPC install, I can't leave things where they are without taking a few more distros for a spin.

Right now I'm installing Fedora 9. I've been wanting to try it for awhile, and the fact that it is made for both PowerPC and i386 means it's something I could run on the Mac and my laptop, if I decide to go that way.

Update: I was working the nightshift, and I started the installation about 5 p.m. It was still downloading packages when I left at midnight.

I've had great things to say about the graphical Anaconda installer when I was installing CentOS, but the text-mode version on this Fedora-for-PPC network-install disc could be much better.

I guess if I hadn't done maybe 20 Debian and about as many Ubuntu installs over the past two years, I might look less favorably on the text-based installer for both. But I do look on the Debian installer favorably, as I do the installer for CentOS. So it's not about being overly familiar with Debian and not so much with Fedora.

This text-based installer for Fedora 9 on PowerPC is, for lack of a better word, barbaric.

I'm using the network install ISO, and that meant the packages would come over the Internet. I made the mistake the first time of saying that the packages were on the CD, after which the installer told me that no, there were no packages on the disc. It took me a couple of times to figure out that I had to tell the installer that the packages were indeed coming via network.

Couldn't Anaconda somehow figure out that I'm using the network-install disc?

Once I selected network install, I was prompted for information on my network connection; nothing out of the ordinary there.

But then I had to select a mirror. Unlike the Debian installer, in Fedora you don't get a list from which to choose a mirror. You either have the information written down, or you go to another computer and start digging into the documentation to find a mirror.

I did the latter and finally found a proper mirror.

I'm still not all that experienced in rolling my own partitions in PowerPC, so I let the installer set them up for me. It looks like Fedora's default is to go with logical volume management. This might be a good time for me to get schooled a bit on how to work with LVM.

Once I went forward in the install process and chose the desktop selection of packages, the process began. That was a couple of hours ago, and it looks like it's going to be a long wait for all 920 packages to download and install.

I don't know how well Fedora will perform on the G4 with 128 MB of RAM (I've been meaning to hunt down some more memory ...), and that's where this tale will resume.

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.