Dr. Dave here, it's been a month since my last post so I thought I'd apologize for the big break. This is not due to a lack of interest in PowerPC! It is in part due to a very hectic and full work schedule, but also due to yet another video chip failure on my ibook G4 1.07 ghz. This is now the third ibook (one G3 and two G4's) that has gone south due to the video chip becoming unseated from the board. I could of course try and "flame it" back down as others have famously done, but at this point I really want to move away from the ibook line as a whole. In part I kept with ibooks so I could use one machine as a parts mule for the other, but that is clearly a flawed plan when the video chips keep failing. I was debating my next PowerPC step when...
...A retired University professor I've known forever called. He was about to toss a Power Mac G4 he hadn't turned on in three years into a dumpster, after removing the hard drive of course. The specs? A 1.4 ghz (Giga Designs) upgraded Sawtooth (AGP graphics), 2 GB of RAM with a ATI Radeon 9200 with 128 MB of VRAM. I think everyone who reads this blog would sensibly do what I did, and throw themselves between the dumpster and the Power Mac.
Inspired by Zen's recent post I decided to skip Lubuntu PPC or MintPPC and just go the the heart of the matter, ie the shiny new Debian 7. As with Zen, I'm happy to report the install was utterly painless, just a click or two here and there. In fact, I'd have to say it was one of the least painful Linux or Mac OS X installs I've ever done. Hat's off to the Debian PowerPC team, whoever and wherever you are! It's early days for me and Debian 7, but so far it is hella impressive. Debian 7 PowerPC is stable, secure and sweet. There are a few things to learn and do differently if you are more familiar with 'buntu land, but nothing major.
After 25 years I now no longer have any working Mac OS installs, PowerPC or Intel. It's my intention to use Linux exclusively in the future, as I don't really do any content creation that would require OS X, and find VLC and Mplayer wholly adequate for my media playback needs. With Debian 7 I've got Firefox 17.0.7 and luakit for my web browsing, and a host of audio players to choose from. Who needs OS X Maverick, anyway?
Near future posts will cover youtube playback, office suites and other neat things.
Congratulations on the new powermac g4!
ReplyDeleteVery nice to know that debian install is now easy, hope to see even more linux powerpc posts here, linux is our (powerpc users) future (apart from the ones that really need mac apps for work).
Just out of curiosity, what desktop environment are you running in the G4?
Thanks! A free G4 with those specs...I couldn't let it go to the landfill. I forgot to mention it in the post but I also got a mint Clamshell Tangerine ibook...not sure exactly what I am going to do with that yet, its got a super slow noisy old HD, that has to go, and taking those things apart....
ReplyDeleteMy install was indeed very easy...as always,your mileage may vary. The G4 towers seem especially adept at accepting Linux, the G5's and snowball imac G4's are giving others headaches.
I chose the LXDE desktop for its ultra low RAM requirment, though with 2 GB I have plenty of RAM to run XFCE or GNOME, I just don't particularly care for either. The older I get the less bling I need, and LXDE is super speedy.
I've said it before but we really need NEW PowerPC hardware...the proposed P-Cubed dual Processor PowerPC board from Servergy had me all excited last year, but it seems to have just been vaporware.
Of course not, that is a heck of a machine!
DeleteI am somehow curious about ram and cpu/gpu usage of gnome vs the others.In my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X230) I have arch linux installed along with gnome and the ram usage is very low.
Right now I have two powerpc boxes:
Powermac G5 Quad/2Gb/Nvidia 7800GT
Powermac G4 GE/400MHz/2Gb/Rage 128/3dfx Voodoo 2 12Mb SLi
I will give a try on debian on the G5(maybe xfce of gnome) but as soon as I have more time I will try lxde on the G4.
I was very suprised with the performance of lubuntu on an Asus eee pc atom based, so in a good powerpc I guess it can make wonders too.
Welcome back, Doc. I also have a G4 iBook similar to yours. With Debian "stable" on it neither wifi or ethernet would work "out of the box". My Quicksilver, however, runs Debian 7.1 flawlessly, although I found that installing LXDE over a default Gnome install left me with a terminal that was black text on a black background. No problems when I installed LXDE as the default environment to begin with. There is still much work to do.
ReplyDelete@Thomas
ReplyDeleteAll you need to do is go to the Terminal preferences in the edit menu and make the text and background colour whatever you want. You certainly didn't need to reinstall anything. As for the ethernet and wifi... it's typically only wifi that doesn't work on portables. Since I have never owned or installed Debian (or any Linux) on any iBook I cannot works out a sure solutions for the driver you need because I cannot recreate it.
PowerPC portables are some of the most specific hardware combinations ever made and because of this they are less capable out of the box with non-apple OS. The PowerPC portables are also about the most unreliable hardware ever made on the architecture. Those Ibooks are almost at iMac G5 levels of shit.
The greatest PowerPC hardware ever made will always be the G3 and G4 towers. This is because they don't have to sacrifice the endless things portables have to.
I personally hate portables but would consider one to provide first had real world fixes for PowerPC laptops. My creed is to only ever use a portable if I truly need portability.
@Dr.Dave
I only have OS X Leopard on my main Sawtooth now to have the extra power and CorePlayer for video. I also still use Hardbrake for OS X on a daily basis pretty much. All I use Mac OS for now is video playback, gaming, Music/iTunes (because of my ipod shuffle) and some light work in Pixelmator. The only internet use I do with Mac OS now is visit trusted sites via Camino.
We are both officially all in on the Debian stance. It's what I always wanted here but I wanted to give another distro (Lubuntu) a bigger voice. Debian is just better on the surface and underneath. Now it has two blogs (us and the Luddite) dedicated to it. The best distro, and the one many are based on, deserves all the attention.
This is why Linus Torvalds famously gave the finger to Nvida. They are the worst company as far as cooperating with the Linux Foundation. Which annoys the hell out of him cause they sell tons of chips for Android, but won't help with driver issues for their cards.
DeleteMaybe a cheap replacement video card could solve your issues? I am sorta at the point where I don't like spending a whole lot of money on older computers. Especially when people will give you one for free! Ok, I am lucky..
@ Zen...."those ibooks are on almost imac G5 levels of shit." So true! I've owned both and they were nothing but problems waiting to happen. With the imac G5 in addition to bad RAM that came from the factory I had the infamous blown capacitors. G4 Towers on the other hand are the T-34 tanks of computers.
ReplyDeleteA working Coreplayer is definitely worth staying with OS X for, I had a Coreplayer install on the second ibook G4, but obviously when that went south with the video board, and the next week Mobihand shut its doors. I'll probably get a universal drive adapter to have the option of at least using the 7200 RPM drive thats in the ibook if only for itunes.
@ Thomas I am glad your Quicksilver install went well at least. How was GNOME on it? The Luddite had some great tips for getting wifi working on an ibook with Debian as I recall. That was one of the great things about MintPPC, wifi and ethernet always worked "out of the box" for me on the ibooks I've installed it on. I speak of it in the past tense as the developer of MintPPC says he can't devote time to a new version right now, which is too bad. I feel like with Wheezy out and stable Debian is the way forward for PowerPC now, as it is more than a one man show, supported-and seems like it will be for years to come. I am more than willing to trade a little bleeding edge for stability and longevity.
From what I've gathered the late model Powerbook G4's are the most reliable. I have never owned one so can't comment personally on that. The white ibooks were plagued with reliability and quality control issues almost from day one. If you have a "good" one, then you are among the lucky. The G3 Powerbooks on the other hand were built in the same tank like fashion. I owned a Titanium G4 and loved it, until the paint started to peel and the hinges cracked.....design wise though it is still a beauty.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I really loved about my ibooks was the size factor. Not quite a full laptop, also not quite a netbook. I also owned a 12 inch Powerbook and loved it for that reason too, in fact if I were going to purchase a new portable it might be a late model 2005 Powerbook G4 12 inch.
It is always a good idea to have parts mules around. If you live near a University they sometimes have stacks of "for parts" G4's around that one can purchase for next to nothing.
Congratulations on the new hardware. The Clamshell could be very useful to try software on very low specifications macs.
ReplyDeleteI finally found the time to install Linux, and following advice here and on the Luddite's blog I chose Debian with LXDE. Even if I'm a complete Linux noob the install was not difficult, thanks to the Luddite's utterly excellent guide. I will need some more free time to set up everything as I want. It all looks very unfamiliar to me, but I like the challenge (and day to day usage does not look difficult at all, once you figure out where to find things).
And of course i tried Luakit. You are absolutely right, it is a very cool and fast little browser. I couldn't say if it's faster than L-W on Leopard, but it looks really really good (and please notice that I've yet to implement system wide adblocking in Debian, and that I subjected Safari to heavy tweaking to improve its speed, so I would already be very happy if Luakit was just as fast).
@ mclcmm congrats on the Linux install, what hardware did you put it on ? The luddites Debian install guide is among the things out there, so easy to follow, so much information, so well written...
ReplyDeleteMy plan with the clamshell is as you describe, a low end (very) test machine. Others have put MintPPC 9.3 on the same machine and still report decent usability, provided you don't have too many things open. Since the hard drive is ancient and slow I will likely put a Compact Flash card in once I had a adapter. I am thinking Debian Openbox ala the Luddite. Or maybe...Openstep. Now that would be cool.
Luakit is the shizzy. Sure its got a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it it becomes addictive. I also like Links2 a lot, it is even faster, and for certain sites it gives me everything I want with nothing I don't want (like, ads). Its also a very retro way to get around the nytimes.com paywall. Not that I am saying you should do that...but you could...
It 's a 1.25 GHz eMac with 2 GBs ram. Install was smooth but I'm having some problems setting it up. So far I've not been able to get 3D hardware acceleration (even after downgrading to Mesa 7 ) and the brightness keys do not work no matter how I configure pbbuttonsd. But time constraints have prevented me from dedicating the right amount of googleing to solve these issues, plus the system is already usable for basic tasks. I'm sure that once I will know the OS better I will be able to make everything work as it should.
DeleteExcalibur
DeleteSorry for the delayed response, I have been away from an internet connection for a couple days.
This one, I've ordered it but don't have it yet:
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad44midecf.php
It has dual CF capabilities, ie master and slave drive slots, though from what I've read you need to have a removable CF card in the slave and the UDMA card in the master, or things will go funky on you. I'd like to keep the option of have Mac OS 9 around.
I am using some off the shelf San Disks (16 GB) I already have. Whether or not these will work we shall see.
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