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?