Unboxing and Exploring
After much tracking number checking and eagerly waiting, my new to me iBook G4 arrived.
I know an iBook G4 was not the most reliable or easy to work on machine I could have gone with. It did seem like a fun project though. It also reminded me of college. I had an iBook G4 very briefly and an iBook G3 for a couple of semesters.
The iBook I received is an 800MHZ model. It came with an Apple branded 512MB RAM stick, otherwise it appears to be stock. The seller I got this iBook from bought all of the stock of a repair shop that had gone out of business. The machine was powered on and in MacOS in the eBay listing. I did find a new old stock 1GB stick of RAM on eBay as well.
Upon installing the RAM upgrade, I began to see evidence that I was not the first person to dive into the machine. The RAM cover is missing two screws and the AirPort Extreme retention clip.
The routing of this cable may also be off. I do not recall if my other iBooks were like this.
Here was the OEM RAM upgrade before it came out.
After buttoning the iBook back up, I started an install of MacOS Leopard. Since this machine is 67MHZ shy of Leopard's CPU speed requirement, I had to perform an open firmware trick. This trick causes the CPU to temporarily present it's clock speed higher than what it actually is. A quick Google search turns up several pages detailing how to do this. This was the link that I used. https://tinyapps.org/docs/install_and_optimize_leopard_on_unsupported_macs.html.
After the install completed, I was able to get all of the software updates installed.
This is a good place to stop for this entry. So far so good. I have not experienced any kernel panics, screen issues or graphics issues.
Starting Over
I look back at everything I have written here over the years. I see lots of unfinished and half done projects. Cooling mods for PowerMacs and ancient IDEs on PowerBooks, all of which have been lost to downsizing, moves and storage unit thefts. It is wild how much things have changed over the years.
At any rate, I will leave this here.
Stay tuned!
At any rate, I will leave this here.
Stay tuned!
Gratitude
I am sure most of you have heard about the news regarding TenFourFox and Classilla. If you have not here is a link to what I am talking about,
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html.
Reading this has made me look back over my PowerPC Mac experience. I am left feeling extremely grateful. Prior to my experiences with post Leopard PowerPC Masc I had only dabbled with Ubuntu on x86 and amd64 machines here and there. Running Debian Jessie and Wheezy on PowerPC Macs is what really gave my GNU/Linux skills a solid foundation. Having the ability to hop over to Tiger and/or Leopard and run TenFourFox at any given moment throughout all these years has been nothing short of amazing. One of, if not my most favorite periods of time in my technical journey has been the time spent on PowerPC Macs. TenFourFox was an absolutely integral part of this time.
Feel free to join me in the comments as I close by thanking Cameron Kaiser. We really appreciate the tireless, amazing work you have done for our community. Thank you for everything!
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html.
Reading this has made me look back over my PowerPC Mac experience. I am left feeling extremely grateful. Prior to my experiences with post Leopard PowerPC Masc I had only dabbled with Ubuntu on x86 and amd64 machines here and there. Running Debian Jessie and Wheezy on PowerPC Macs is what really gave my GNU/Linux skills a solid foundation. Having the ability to hop over to Tiger and/or Leopard and run TenFourFox at any given moment throughout all these years has been nothing short of amazing. One of, if not my most favorite periods of time in my technical journey has been the time spent on PowerPC Macs. TenFourFox was an absolutely integral part of this time.
Feel free to join me in the comments as I close by thanking Cameron Kaiser. We really appreciate the tireless, amazing work you have done for our community. Thank you for everything!
Still A Place For OS9
For years I've used my Macs to produce and write music - generally favouring Propellerhead Reason for purely electronic pieces, Garageband where real instruments need to be recorded and often using both in combination.
The final step to a recording after mixing down
is mastering to give it that extra zing and dynamics - for this I use
SonicWORX which is an OS9 application.
Initially this would mean copying files to a thumbdrive, moving to an
OS9 machine, processing then copying back but now I complete the process
with VNC over Ethernet.
My OS9 machine for this task is my 800Mhz G4 iMac which sits in my desk corner keyboardless and mouseless.
I activate sharing between it and my Mac Pro, copy the files to be
processed across, then use Chicken of the VNC to open up a remote
session on the iMac.
The audio files are processed and copied back in the same manner they were sent.
So, there's still a place for OS9 and it's easy to include it in an OSX workflow.
Updating VLC To Play Youtube
When VLC was last updated for PowerPC it was possible to play Youtube links copied into it - alas that ability has long since expired but you can bring it back with a few updated components.
This only applies to the last PPC iteration of VLC, version 2.0.10 and also requires the ever wonderful PPCMC (for latest security certificates and curl.)
The following code copied into Terminal will do the following:
Make a directory in VLC preferences for the latest security certificates
Delete the old Youtube lua script from VLC
Create a symlink in VLC preferences of the security certificates in PPCMC (this will update when PPCMC is updated)
Finally, using curl, copy the latest Youtube lua script into VLC
mkdir -p ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc/ssl/certs
rm -f /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/playlist/youtube.luac
ln -s /Applications/PPCMC.app/certs/cacert.pem ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
/Applications/PPCMC.app/bin/curl --insecure https://raw.githubusercontent.com/videolan/vlc/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua -o /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua
From the download here extract the compact Youtube browser, Choob and the VLC scripts, VLSEE and VLLISTEN into Applications and create shortcuts in the dock (right hand side for VLSEE/VLLISTEN as they are scripts.) Open VLC and in Preferences - /Input/Codecs change the Preferred video resolution to Standard and close.
Opening Choob, browse to your chosen video, right click to copy the link then click the VLSEE dock shortcut - VLC will open and quickly stream the video - quit VLC when finished.If you want to stream audio only then do the same but with VLLISTEN.
Virtual PC and Ancient IDEs: Part 1 - Setting up Virtual PC
As mentioned in my previous post I have set up a 17 inch PowerBook G4 for Python, Objective-C and C++ development. One of my newfound time-sinks-that-brings-me-joy is setting up old Windows environments and installing very old IDEs. Examples include Visual C++ 6, Borland Delphi 7 and most recently PalmOS IDEs. I thought to myself, why not set up VirtualPC on my PowerBook and see how viable it would be? That is what I will cover here in this post. My ultimate goal is to set up a Windows 98 virtual PC and a Windows 2000 virtual PC then set up the IDEs on both virtual PCs. This will be a good way to compare performance between the two OSs under Microsoft Virtual PC.
Setting up Microsoft Virtual PC was fairly straight forward. I grabbed the Virtual PC 7.02 installer, 7.03 updater and the modified networking kext from the Macintosh Garden. Installing Virtual PC 7.02 and then updating it to version 7.03 was a simple software install. Now onto the Now onto the quirk. As pointed out at the Macintosh Garden, if Virtual PC is left as is on Mac OS Leopard, a kext icon will appear on your dock and bounce up and down while Virtual PC is running. I copied over the modified kext to /Library/Extensions as instructed. When I opened Virtual PC after doing this, Virtual PC said "The software necessary to run Virtual PC for Mac is either missing or is installed incorrectly" and then repaired itself, reverting the kext at /Library/Extensions back to its original state. I opened the original and the modified kexts to see if I could see any differences between the two. I found that the modified kext's info.plist had two extra lines.
Here is the original info.plist...
Here is the modified info.plist...
I opened the original kext in Text Wrangler, navigated to info.plist and added the two additional lines after the nested/inner dict block. Text Wrangler notified me that I did not have the privilege to modify this file. It asked for my password and saved the file after I authenticated. I was then able to open Virtual PC without being asked to repair my install or watch the white Lego jump up and down on the dock.
At this point I was able to make virtual PCs and install OSs on them. I made one for Windows 98 and Windows 2000. After the Windows installs completed, I installed the virtual PC additions for both virtual machines. This is done by clicking the PC menu then clicking the Install or Update Additions option.
This is a good stopping point. I wanted to share my experience with the kext quirk and what I had to do to fix it. As I set up the IDEs on these two virtual PCs I will share my findings and takes here.
As always, thank you for reading. Have fun!
TuneCatcher - A Youtube Audio Player
I've often heard people on the MacRumors PowerPC
forum say that they like to use Youtube for audio playback only -
listening to albums or gigs etc so don't really require all the CPU
intensive donkey work of playing video.
With that in mind I've
cobbled together TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer - scripts that play audio
only and save on all important CPU cycles.
Included in the
install is Choob - a TenFourFoxBox Youtube browser preloaded with a
vintage Nokia N90 user agent (hence the groovy app icon) which eschews
all the usual Youtube script clutter and allows you to browse for videos
quickly and efficiently.
Download and unzip the installer dmg -
once mounted there is a choice of two installers. Youtube-dl is a
requirement for this package, so if you have it installed as normal or
with PPCMC, choose the appropriate installer.
Incidentally, PPCMC is a must have application for any PowerPC Mac - apart from it's core functionality it's also a Swiss Army Knife of essential tools including Python, youtube-dl, ffmpeg, curl and soon, ffplay all in one package without the usual fuss of needing X11 and Macports.
The installer will create a TubeAudio folder in ~/Music and place Choob, mplayer, TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer in /Applications.
Use
Choob to browse for your desired clip, right click and Copy Link
Location, then click on TuneCatcher in the dock (assuming you made a
shortcut earlier.)
The link is passed to youtube-dl, the m4a audio
file is downloaded and opened by MPlayer where the normal keyboard
shortcuts apply for playback control.
When the clip is finished (or stopped) it is moved to ~/Music/TubeAudio/Archive.
Note,
the m4a encoding used on Youtube is problematic to PowerPC Macs -
without conversion they'll need to be played in either MPlayer or VLC.
If
the Youtube clip you want to play is of a length unreasonable to
download, choose TuneStreamer instead but be aware this will not keep a
copy of the clip.
Also because of piping the stream via stdin the normal MPlayer controls aren't available.
Download is available here.
Download the G3 compatible version here.
Unfortunately, mplayer for G3 doesn't accommodate streaming or playing
m4a audio, so using TuneCatcher, a standard 360P video is downloaded
which mplayer plays without processing the video.
MPlayer keyboard shortcuts for reference:
Pause/Play.....Space
Left/Right.......Back/Forward 10 seconds
Up/Down........Back/Forward 1 minute
9/0................Volume -/+
[ ].................Decrease/Increase playback speed by 10%
ESC...............Stop and quit
Blogging Like It's 1999
Pardon the lazy Prince pun/reference but all will become clear...
While writing theses posts will always primarily be done in front of a Mac screen, it's nice to have the ability to write when out and about too - enter my pocket sized, vintage Oregon Scientific Osaris from 1999 - a budget copy of the mighty Psion Series 5 PDA.
Being an 18Mhz EPOC32 device, this thing only gently nibbles away on two AA batteries and saves files to a Compact Flash card - so even in the worst case scenario of the main and backup batteries failing, my data is safe.
Whilst working on a post it's no sweat to swap the Compact Flash card out of the Osaris and use an adaptor to share it with a Mac, however, I'm reluctant to place repetitive strain on the card hatch and connector on the Osaris - I'd rather use it's friction and fatigue free infrared port.
This is by necessity more than anything, as unfortunately, buying the Osaris secondhand, it didn't come supplied with the original serial connector lead so the only connectivity available is the infrared port and luckily, I do have an old USB infrared dongle - however, it only works with Windows 98/ME/XP.
At the moment I don't have a PC - old or otherwise - permanently setup but what I do have is Virtual PC 7 on my Powerbook.
So, after installing Windows 98SE to a 1Gb virtual drive, and doing a few optimisations to keep the CPU demands down, the workflow is as follows.
With the USB infrared dongle attached and in range of my Osaris with Desktop Link activated, I start Windows 98 and launch PsiWin (the connectivity manager designed for Psion PDAs but also fully compatible with the Osaris.)
Once the infrared serial connection is made, from PsiWin I can browse my Osaris and it's Compact Flash card and exchange files - in this instance, an EPOC Word document is imported and converted to a TXT file (MS Word and other options are available too.)
The same applies in reverse if I wanted to import a document to the Osaris with PsiWin converting the file to a native EPOC version.
Once within Windows, my document is readily accessible to OSX where I can work on it or share it to another device via WebDAV.
Virtual PC often gets a rough deal in the PowerPC sphere as being a poor substitute for Windows but I've had good use out of it - the key is to have reasonable expectations, use the oldest compatible version of Windows for your applications and to realise it's performance doesn't scale with the spec of your Mac.
wicknix
In my two plus years away from this blog, I was also away from using PowerPC hardware most of the time. So I hadn't been keeping up with the development of PowerPC software much. Then I come back to find someone named wicknix who frequents the Mac Rumors PowerPC forum. This guy has been very busy developing PowerPC and early Intel software, and he's done some pretty amazing work for Linux and Mac OS X users alike.
He also has a blog called Random Mac Stuff where you can find all his software.
So I just wanted to help bring awareness to the amazing efforts this guy has made. I have had written correspondence with him, and I can tell you he's extremely humble. I was trying to recruit him to write here, but he's just too busy. So thanks for all your work, wicknix!
A list of everything he has done and/or contributed to:
Arctic Fox Browser for 10.6
InterWeb Browser for 10.6 & 10.7+
SpiderWeb Browser for 10.6 & 10.7+
Software for 10.4 - 10.7 and PowerPC Linux
Lubuntu PowerPC 12.04 & 16.04 Remix live DVD + installer
Debian Sid PowerPC Remix installer
How to install Fienix Soar on 32-bit PPC Macs
How to watch Twitch Streams on 10.3/10.4/10.5 (he contributed the twitch script)
Security of the mind
Security is a very dynamic sort of thing quite often. It changes a lot over time, but it also often stays the same in many ways. For the average user out there, they only have the know-how to rely on the OS for all potential security threats. We all have experience using the internet every single day, but some don't utilize the best security tool on earth... your own sound judgment. But sound judgment often derives from experience. From experience comes confidence, and from confidence comes a sound mind. Confidence should never be cocky though, because that will get you into trouble eventually.
When you consider that Apple hasn't offered a security update for a PowerPC OS since 2009... we really are on our own with OS X. But that's okay, because we the users dictate how secure we are through our own habits online. And I am guilty myself of not having the confidence in some to be their own best security in my past writing here. I don't know if that ever hurt anyone's confidence back then, but I certainly didn't help it either. This changes now to a personal policy of encouraging confidence once people are put on the right path. I'm going to instill confidence rather than fear.
We notice things much easier when of a calm mind, and awareness is very important with security.
So the point here is don't allow the lack of security updates on OS X to ever stop you from using it online. Look no further than TenFourFox for modern web compatibility and security. We really owe so much to Cameron Kaiser, because he alone has kept Mac OS PowerPC a viable internet platform. So let's give him the respect he deserves.
I have been away from PowerPC Linux for a few years now, and need to re familiarize myself with it again, so for the next few months at least, my writing will be Mac OS related, and to me that's a great place to start after a two year hiatus here.
So for the next few months I will be doing a series of writings on OS X PowerPC security in 2020/2021, and how to best protect yourself. To instill in you what I have to offer in me to keep yourself safe on operating systems that are 11+ years old now. Only now instead of a Sawtooth, I'm using a G4 mini that dual boots Tiger and Leopard.
You're all going to have hardened ceramic armour shells when I'm done with you! I hope you all can deal with that!
WebDAV and Goliath
It's been a few years now since Dropbox ceased support for PowerPC and although there was a community workaround that worked for a while, that too fell by the wayside with ongoing developments at Dropbox.
Folder syncing has never been a specific requirement for myself but having convenient access to a central repository across various machines is always useful - for this I use the WebDAV protocol supported by various online storage providers either via Finder in OSX or with the excellent WebDAV client, Goliath (which I personally find delivers faster file transfers.)
So, after signing up to an online storage provider - one that includes WebDAV access - in OSX Finder go to Go/Connect to Server (or press CMD+k) and enter the provider's WebDAV URL and press Connect. Enter your username and password in the next dialogue and tick box to remember password.
All being well, the remote server will be mounted onto the Desktop and be available to all standard file operations just like any attached storage. For convenience, I make an alias of the mounted drive, move it to Documents and drag to the dock to provide instant access in future.
Note - to prevent .DS_Store files cluttering up your remote drive with this method, run the following in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
The procedure is similar when using Goliath - making a new connection, enter URL, username and password and once connected, go File/Save Connection As to save a WebDAV bookmark that can be launched from the dock if desired.
Of course, the advantage of Goliath is that it's available for OS9 too - it's quite remarkable at this late stage to still have the convenience of online connected storage on such an old OS.
In addition, all these online storage providers have a web interface accessible from anywhere and usually have purpose built mobile apps for Android and iOS - in addition, there's always mobile WebDAV clients too - even my beleaguered Windows Phone 10 powered Lumia 930 can get in on the action with it's WebDAV equipped Total Commander file manager!
WebDAV access is a refreshing change in these twilight days of PowerPC - an online service that spans legacy systems and doesn't tax the CPU in any way.
For those wishing for a more Dropbox like folder syncing facility, with a compatible provider, rsync can be utilised for effective backups but for now WebDAV suits me fine.
These are a few WebDAV compatible providers but there will be more - if anyone has any suggestions please ad in the comments:
Adrive
4Shared
SwissDisk
User Agents And The Art Of Online Camouflage
The user agent is a digital calling card presented by a web browser when it visits a website, identifying it and telling the website what content is best served to that particular web browser - the simplest example being the web browser on a mobile device will receive content more proportionally formatted for a smaller, portrait screen whereas when viewed from a laptop or desktop, the web browser will deliver the fully featured site.
This user agent can also inform the web site what features it should deploy - an old browser will perhaps be incapable of rendering certain content, so that content can be effectively cut out.
This all becomes relevant, especially to us PowerPC users, when it's possible to present an alternative user agent from the one your web browser natively employs - preferably to lessen CPU load and rendering times.
This has been a feature for a while with standard browser options or add-ons that facilitate selecting different user agents but what I shall discuss in this post is site specific user agents ie user agents that present themselves on a site by site basis automatically as you browse.
This legacy feature is present in the PPC spins of ArcticFox and IceWeasel but wasn't present in TenFourFox (which I'll utilise here) until I asked the developer to reintroduce it which he very generously did.
In the TenFourFox preferences, I leave the user agent at it's default setting and add site specific user agents with TextWrangler editing the TenFourFox prefs.js file that resides in
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/go96ey5b.default
the last part of that location string may look different on your machine but will always terminate with .default.
This is an example string added to prefs.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override.youtube.com", "NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1");
In this instance, browsing to any youtube.com address will invoke the Nokia N90 user agent automatically - presenting a less busy page, free of Youtube's normal CPU hungry "features" and allowing access to the video in 3gp format (more of this in a future post.)This process is repeated for all the sites you wish to include - a laborious task admittedly but one you'll only have to do once.
User agents can be copied from online sources or you can even use those included within TenFourFox as standard - select one in preferences, then navigate to whatsmyua and copy/paste the string.
Another method for adding site specific user agents is from within the browser itself - navigate to about:config and right click to add a new string. As per the example above, general.useragent.override.youtube.com is added as the preference name, then NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 is added as the string value.
Generally, I will use either the oldest browser I can reasonably get away with or a Nokia mobile user agent for sites where I don't need all the CPU sapping bells and whistles - not only does this show mercy to your ageing PPC Mac but also loads pages quicker and in some cases is refreshingly distraction free.
Some example screens of TenFourFox pretending to be otherwise....
Drones beware!
After a two year hiatus, myself and fiftysixk are returning the blog to an active state. And we hope the other authors will join us.
To help liven things up a bit around here, we have brought in the Dronecatcher himself from the MacRumors PowerPC forum. That's right... the guy who can make web video play on a toaster has joined the PowerPC Liberation fold, and I for one am thrilled to have him! Welcome, Wayne!
I've been thinking of a few different ideas for new content, as I just tricked out my G4 mini. Stay tuned for something to do with that in the near future.
If any readers have any ideas for new content, then please share them in the comments.
A hopeful real return
It has been quite a while, over two years to more precise. I hope every one is well and healthy, especially during these trying times.
I have moved into a development position at my employer. My on the job focus revolves around ASP.net, C# and querying Microsoft SQL databases. This has been a wonderful opportunity to learn and self teach. I now have enough experience and theory to branch out to other languages. My goal is to pursue Python, Swift, Objective-C and C++. I have a "27inch iMac" and a 2015 MacBook Air for pursuing Swift. I have set up a 17 inch PowerBook G4 for Python, Objective-C and C++ development. I have no idea what software I would like to build yet. I have time to figure that out, there is plenty of learning to do first. I still have several PowerPC Macs besides the 17 inch PowerBook G4 mentioned earlier.
I will share the journey here. I have documented my current process I go through when setting up a Tiger or Leopard install. You can find them at my git repository. Any software I create will also be hosted there.
I know it has been a while. It is good to be back with all of you. Take care!
Debian PPC Status Update
Earlier this month, the migration of the Debian PPC port from Debian's main archive to the Debian ports archive was completed. The DSAs' shut down of the powerpc buildds on the main archive was a result of the PPC port no longer being a release architecture. With this change, also comes the need to update one's
sources.list file. Also keep in mind that if you want to continue running Debian on your PPC hardware and have the latest updates and security fixes, you'll need to be running unstable (a.k.a Sid) on your systems. As frightening as that sounds, running unstable has actually been pretty stable for me since I made the move around 7 months ago.However, before making the switch, you'll want to install the Debian Ports archive keyring package first, otherwise you'll receive errors about missing public keys for the Debian Ports mirrors (such as ftp.ports.debian.org) when attempting to run apt update. In a small and condensed nutshell, this package provides the public keys needed to verify the signatures on the packages available from the Debian ports mirrors that are digitally signed with the corresponding private keys. See here for a bit more information on Debian's keyrings. To install, run the following:
apt install debian-ports-archive-keyring
Here is what I currently have in my
/etc/apt/sources.list file. Feel free to use this as a solid starting point and adapt from there to best fit your needs. Also bear in mind that changes to this file requires sudo privileges.
# Binary Default
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ unstable main
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ unreleased main
# Package Source deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main
# Non-free firmware deb [arch=all] http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ unstable main
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ unreleased main
# Package Source deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main
# Non-free firmware deb [arch=all] http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
The first two lines provide access to the PPC or PPC64 Debian package binaries (with what few PPC64 binaries exist) for both unstable and unreleased. The package source section allows me to still download a package's source so I could tweak, build and/or install from scratch. Lastly, the non-free firmware entry allows me to still search and download packages from Debian's main archives that are compatible with all architectures (for example:
linux-firmware-nonfree). This is especially useful for downloading Nvidia and AMD/Radeon firmware for your graphics card.For more possible sources.list configurations for your PPC machines, see this mailing list post from John Paul Glaubitz who is basically spearheading a large part of this effort by himself. You have more options to choose from than what I've chosen to include in my own
sources.list.Again, thankfully him and others are willing to keep the port alive for the Debian distribution via the Debian Ports project. Although the chances of PPC ever being re-introduced as a first class release architecture are slim to none, I'm encouraged by the fact that we can still run the latest and greatest with a majority of the packages that are available for Debian.
Of course, there are an infinite numbers of ways you can help contribute to the Debian Ports project including:
- Simply installing and running Debian on your PPC and PPC64 machines
- Submitting bug reports
- Being active on the Debian PPC as well as other Debian ports mailing lists
- Submitting patches for any PPC and PPC64 bugs
- Hosting another mirror for the Debian Ports project
One of the major projects for the PPC and PPC64 ports is migrating the architectures away from the no longer maintained Yaboot (last updated in 2011!) bootloader over to Grub. Any help you can provide in this regard would be much appreciated. If you need the latest installer ISO for PPC or PPC64, you can find those here.
Are you still using Debian on your PPC or PPC64 machines? It's not too late to continue doing so or get started. While you're at it, load up Debian on machines running other architectures such as m68k, hppa, etc. Let's keep this port and others alive for the foreseeable future. I'm sure we're to learn a thing or two along the way.
Back with a surprise
Hello everyone. I hope you have all been well. My apologies for falling off of the face of the earth. It is wild how time flies by. Enough about that though, it is time for the surprise.
There will be more details and plans shortly. It has already been quirky but hey, it is a G5 after all.
It is good to be back.
Why I finally ride the SSD train
For the longest time... I was always against using SSD's, as reliability had been an issue for the first several years they were on the market. Now however, I have discovered the Samsung 850 EVO series of 2.5" SSD's, and damn are they amazing. I have one in my Sawtooth, and one in my late 2009 Mac mini. The performance and reliability is amazing all-round.
As my Sawtooth relies on a PCI-M slot powered SATA 1 controller, I am limited to around 80MB/sec read and write, but the latency is incredibly good. On my Intel mini, with SATA 2, I get sustained speeds of 270MB/sec read and 210MB/sec write. It's also the most reliable boot drive I have ever used. More on all this later.
I know this place has seemed dead in the last year or so, but I can assure you it's not. There is still plenty of hits every day here, and I am starting to use my PowerPC systems more lately. Also, I recently picked up a 1.5GHz 12" PowerBook G4 for next to nothing. What a great machine.
I still have five PowerPC computers, so new content will come, and hopefully me posting will inspire the other authors. *wink wink* *nudge nudge*
Current state of Linux on PowerPC
I am sure most you have heard that Debian has dropped PowerPC as a release architecture. If anyone is interested in the reading the meeting notes where it was discussed it can be found here. Basically it came down to lack of support. According to the Debian team there were no porters for PowerPC to maintain it as a release architecture. There is also the issue of outstanding bugs. An example is webkit2 is broken under PowerPC and it does not look like it is going to be fixed. The last version of firefox that works under PowerPC is 47. Yaboot has issues as well. In testing and sid you need to create a separate boot partition with ext2 in order for the kernel to load.
PowerPC will still be available in sid. There are some architectures that were once release that are only available there. However this does make the future of bleak. Already this decision is making an impact. The Ubuntu community is already considering dropping PowerPC for Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE. If you want to watch the hangout meeting where this is discussed you can see it here.
So where does that leave us who want to keep our PowerPC machines running a modern secure operating system? For G3, G4, and G5 machines there is the option of Gentoo. The learning curve is steep. However I have not heard discussions of dropping PowerPC. If you have a G5 machine then you also have the options of Fedora, and openSUSE. There is still an attempt to save PowerPC in Debain. The powerpc-notebook project is trying to get people together to help in testing and fixing bugs you can them on this email. You can also get involved in the debain-powerpc mailing list and #debian-ppc IRC channel.
Finally there are the BSDs. I prefer OpenBSD. It is pretty straightforward to get installed and it has the most binary packages for PowerPC. The one biggest drawback I have found is browser support. However sound and video playback work really well.
Please share your thoughts.
Ping
Just a quick note to let you all know we're still alive. Content will come as time allows.
Though we are a team of writers, each of us is also our own satellite - since we each have our own orbits in life. The point is that we write when time allows, which means that when we do post something, you know we mean it.
For the love of Mutt!
I have been trying to see how much I can get done just using the terminal. I have my Debian partition on my PowerBook G4 running Awesome. It is a very lightweight tiling window manager. It does take some practice getting use to but once you have it set up, navigating around is not hard. One tool that I have just come to love is the mutt email client.
I have found very few lightwieght email clients that are really good. Slypheed comes the closest at least in my experience. Thunderbird can be really resource intensive, especially if you are processing a lot of email. This is where the power of mutt comes in. It is simply fast. I can read, reply, delete, and save messages much faster than a gui mail client. This means less of a load on my PowerBook. It also has gpg support so you can sign and encrypt your messages if needed. It really customizable, all your setting are on a config file. What I would like to do is give a walk through on how I have mutt configured and suggest some additional plugins that will enhance the experience.
Install
If you do not have mutt installed in your system it is fairly simple.
apt-get install mutt mutt-patched
Set up and Configure
The package mutt will install the base application. The package mutt-patched install an add-on that allows you to have a sidebar for your folders. Once these install you will want to create a directory named .mutt. Here is where you will store your config files and directories. You can do most of this in one command.
mkdir -pv .mutt/{cache,certificates}
If you look in the /usr/share/doc/mutt/examples directory you will see some sample configuration files. The only one you really need to copy to .mutt/ is the gpg.rc file.
Now it is time to make our muttrc configuration file. I will be working under the assumption that gmail will be where the email is hosted.
The first thing you will want to do set up your credentials for imap and smtp. The imap credentials is what pulls down your emails and folders, whereas the smtp account allows mail to be sent through your provider's email system. Below is an example.
set realname = 'your name'
set from = 'your email'
set use_from = 'yes'
set envelope_from ='yes'
set imap_user = 'your gmail account'
set imap_pass = 'password'
set editor = vim
#smtp
set smtp_url = 'smtp://your email account'
set smtp_pass = 'your password'
set ssl_starttls = yes
set ssl_force_tls = yes
set from = 'your email'
set use_from = 'yes'
set envelope_from ='yes'
set imap_user = 'your gmail account'
set imap_pass = 'password'
set editor = vim
#smtp
set smtp_url = 'smtp://your email account'
set smtp_pass = 'your password'
set ssl_starttls = yes
set ssl_force_tls = yes
I would strongly recommend that if you are using gmail to enable 2-step authentication and application specific passwords. The next thing you might want to do is define your remote folders specifically you inbox, drafts, and trash.
# Folders
# REMOTE GMAIL FOLDERS
set folder = 'imaps://imap.gmail.com:993'
set spoolfile = '+INBOX'
set postponed ='+[Gmail]/Drafts'
set trash = '+[Gmail]/Trash'
# REMOTE GMAIL FOLDERS
set folder = 'imaps://imap.gmail.com:993'
set spoolfile = '+INBOX'
set postponed ='+[Gmail]/Drafts'
set trash = '+[Gmail]/Trash'
When you want to save a draft in mutt, it will ask if you want to postpone it. Mutt will then save to where you defined in the code above. Also it would be a good idea to define local cache as well. Below is an example.
# Local cache
set header_cache =~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir =~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file =~/.mutt/certificates
set header_cache =~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir =~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file =~/.mutt/certificates
The next part is opitional and only needed if you want the sidebar and installed the mutt-patched package. If you did not you can still access your gmail folders by hitting 'c' then '?'. Below is what you will need to have the sidebar.
# Mailboxes to show in the sidebar.
mailboxes ="INBOX" ='[Gmail]/Drafts' ='[Gmail]/Sent Mail' ='label'
# Sidebar Patch --------------------------------------
set sidebar_delim = '│'
set sidebar_visible = yes
#set sidebar_width = 24
set sidebar_shortpath = yes
#Shortcuts
bind index CP sidebar-prev
bind index CN sidebar-next
bind index CO sidebar-open
macro index b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
macro pager b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
bind index B bounce-message
mailboxes ="INBOX" ='[Gmail]/Drafts' ='[Gmail]/Sent Mail' ='label'
# Sidebar Patch --------------------------------------
set sidebar_delim = '│'
set sidebar_visible = yes
#set sidebar_width = 24
set sidebar_shortpath = yes
#Shortcuts
bind index CP sidebar-prev
bind index CN sidebar-next
bind index CO sidebar-open
macro index b '
macro pager b '
bind index B bounce-message
The first section defines the folders that will go into the sidebar, which gmail calls labels. Sublabels can also be added by using ='label/sublabel'. The second portion defines the look of the sidebar and the last portion defines the navigation shortcuts. Finally to enable gpg support do the following.
# GNUPG Config
source /home/user/.mutt/gpg.rc
set pgp_autosign = yes
# set pgp_replysignencrypt = yes
# set pgp_veryfy_sig = yes
set pgp_sign_as = gpg pub key
source /home/user/.mutt/gpg.rc
set pgp_autosign = yes
# set pgp_replysignencrypt = yes
# set pgp_veryfy_sig = yes
set pgp_sign_as = gpg pub key
This will give a basic mutt interface with sidebar and gpg enabled. Now I want to share two addons that will really help enhance your experience in mutt.
goobook
Goobook is a simple utility that allows you to manage you gmail contacts from inside mutt. When it is time to compose a message just hit tab in the 'to:' field or just the begining of the name you want and hit tab. Goobook will present you a list of email addresses to choose from. The install of the package is pretty simple.
apt-get install goobook
Then create a .goobookrc file and add the following.
[default]
email: gmail account
password: password
email: gmail account
password: password
Then run the command goobook authenticate to have gmail verify the tool has rights to manage you contacts. After you have authorized goobook then add the following to the muttrc file.
# Address book using goobook
set query_command="goobook query %s"
macro index,pager a "goobook add" "add sender to google contacts"
bind editor complete-query
set query_command="goobook query %s"
macro index,pager a "
bind editor
urlview
This tool gives you the ability to open urls in messages with an external browser (ie luakit or w3m). The install is the same as the others.
apt-get install urlview
The config file is .urlview. Below is my setup.
#
# Sample urlview(1) configuration file
#
# regular expression to use to match URLs
REGEXP (((http|https|ftp|gopher)|mailto):(//)?[^ <>"\t]*|(www|ftp)[0-9]?\.[-a-z0-9.]+)[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]?[^, <>"\t]*[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]
# command to invoke for selected URL
# COMMAND /etc/urlview/url_handler.sh
COMMAND luakit %s
# set to yes to enable menu wrapping
#WRAP Yes
# Sample urlview(1) configuration file
#
# regular expression to use to match URLs
REGEXP (((http|https|ftp|gopher)|mailto):(//)?[^ <>"\t]*|(www|ftp)[0-9]?\.[-a-z0-9.]+)[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]?[^, <>"\t]*[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]
# command to invoke for selected URL
# COMMAND /etc/urlview/url_handler.sh
COMMAND luakit %s
# set to yes to enable menu wrapping
#WRAP Yes
The key portion is here COMMAND luakit %s. Luakit can be replaced with any browser desired. Finally just add the following section to the muttrc file.
# View URLs inside Mutt
macro index \cb "|urlview\n"
macro pager \cb "|urlview\n"
macro index \cb "|urlview\n"
macro pager \cb "|urlview\n"
When a message is opened hit CTRL+b and you will be given a list of urls to open. Just select one and the browser will open.
I hope this tutorial is helpful. I have my entire muttrc file hosted on github if anyone wants to see what I have set up. If you are for looking a fast flexable email client that will not slow down your PowerPC machine then I would seriously consider giving mutt a try.
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