No laughing matter

There's been a lot of PowerPC Linux talk on Macrumors lately, and the other day a frequent poster had this to say:

" Eh, at least Leopard actually works ;) Linux is not for newbies. Linux is not for a regular Mac "power user". Linux on PPC is inferior to Leopard on PPC, PPC for desktop computing was an uncommon platform at the peak of Apple's PPC days, and now it's basically a relic. The most devoted PowerPC developers are working for the Mac side of things."

This sentiment is both somewhat correct, and completely wrong. As Zen has noted recently there are many things that OS X just plain does better than Linux right now, particularly in the area of media creation. However, there will come a day, not that far off, when using PowerPC OS X will be like using OS 9 is today. Tenfourfox will no doubt still be around in some form, because Dr. Kaiser is one hardcore son of a vet. At that juncture we will have three choices, stay obsolete on PowerPC, go Intel, or go Linux. Ok, you could also go MorphOS, but that is....just really hella obscure. But at least you will have an excellent browser to watch Madonna videos with.

Rather than compare Linux directly to OS X or Windows, I think it's extremely useful to recall that OS X and Windows have two of the world's wealthiest and largest corporations behind them and Linux has....mostly ordinary people behind it. Imagine if you woke up one day and people like you and me were building the open source equivalents of Boeing's 767's, that could fly you around the world, safely, for a fraction the cost, or even for free. That's not a bad analogy, and in the future some predict it will actually happen. Why? Because open source is the future of the world. Free software is like freedom in general, it may take time, but it will eventually destroy every closed, totalitarian system or technology it comes into contact with. Yes, even North Korea will be free one day too. It's inevitable, and hopefully it won't involve any dawns that are brighter than a thousand suns.

I will confess it took me awhile (22 years to be precise), but one day I put down the Kool Aid and realized that Apple was, like North Korea, a totalitarian entity. In other words, once you get drawn into its eco-sytem Apple will control the totality of your technological life (the user "experience" which lets face it, is a very nice one), so it can suck its upgrade tithe out of you every 18-24 months. Apple does this by terrifying their cowering customer/citizens with loss of "support", and lack of new "features". Quick thought experiment: Imagine you bought the Beatles White Album, but in order to keep listening to it every two years you had to buy a completely new record or CD player. And a new copy of the White album, which would  have a couple brand new, not very good tracks on it from Sir Paul and Ringo. No one would do it. Why do we tolerate this kind of larceny when it comes to computers and technology? The same reason they do in North Korea: Fear, and the proper conditioning.

How do you break free from this fear based life? Like us you can become one of the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels who buck the system, resist the urge to upgrade and stay with older hardware and OS'es as long as you can. You're definitely better off, but you still aren't really....free. Not to get all Richard Stahllman on you, but today the only real path to technological freedom is Linux. PowerPC Linux developers are in fact doing amazing work keeping up with x86 Linux, despite an ever aging hardware base. I believe in PowerPC Linux. I believe Macrumors poster Wildy will actually get his Crunchbang PowerPC port completed and released to the wild. I believe the dual core Power P-cubed board from Servergy will get out there and have a RaspberryPi like effect on PowerPC in general. When all these things happen Linux on PowerPC will...suck less, be more newbie friendly, less techie centered. A reboot of Mac-on-Linux would be the final straw. Run your PowerPC mac apps while booted into a completely modern Lubuntu? Now that is some freedom talk.

But this will take smart, freedom-loving people (like us) using PowerPC Linux, not just dissing it. And freedom....is no laughing matter.

Back to the Fox

As Dr. Kaiser noted on the development blog, Tenfourfox 17.0.3 is out, and as always this Dr. downloads the latest release and gives it a spin. For me (and many others) Tenfourfox 8 was the high water mark for Tenfourfox, fast, stable, awesomely awesome stuff. Every version since has seemed subjectively a little slower, and I've moved away from using it as my primary browser. Admitedly I've never done any scientificaly based performance tests, but text fields seemed to hang, pages took longer to load and the greasemonkey script viewtube became unusable for watching youtube within a browser. Maybe on a faster PowerPC mac these things wouldn't be so obvious.

I've only spent just a little over 48 hrs with this Fox, but I am more than a little surprised at how speedy it seems. Pages load well, even with add-ons like Adblocker enabled. Viewtube is again usable, and playback compares well with Click to Plugin in Leopard webkit. Dr. Kaisers' QTE also seems to "see" more webvideo than it did in the past, or maybe its just that more sites are trying to offer up video to flash free devices. The New York Times front page videos as an example are now viewable via the QTE.

This Dr's Rx for this week is: download Tenfourfox 17.0.3, give it a whirl and comment on your personal findings below.

Presto...and its all gone

I am sure you will all join me in wishing good luck to Zen and his new OpenBSD and PowerPC coding adventure. I will do all I can to pick up the slack but the Zen master is unique in his knowledge and depth of PowerPC architecture, the Dr is but a eager student. I am also transitioning jobs at the moment, and starting up a new veterinary clinic is no easy matter. Zen's mighty Stormtrooper G4 (actually a blue and white G3, heavily modded with only the best hardware upgrades) is heading my way soon, complete with a fresh install of 12.04. I plan to put OS X and OS 9 (yes, I think there is still a place for the classic Mac OS in this world) on separate drives and to good use, and pass my old school and new found knowledge along to all who come this way.

As noted by countless others on the web Opera has announced this week that it is switching over from its own Presto rendering engine to the all-mighty juggernaut that is Webkit. Why should PowerPC users care about this, you might ask? Opera abandoned PowerPC OS X and PowerPC Linux back in 2010. Well, the reason is this: a quick run down of Webkit browsers show that it is fast becoming the defacto web browser standard, and as the good Dr. Kaiser has just noted on the tenfourfox development blog, that is more than a little troubling. Think Internet Explorer 6 if you need any recollection of what a defacto web standard looks like. God bloody awful.

With Presto going bye-bye, in 2013 for major browser rendering engines there are: Trident (Internet Explorer and Maxthon, IE was obviously long abandoned for PowerPC), Gecko (Firefox, Seamonkey and for now anyway, Camnio) and Webkit (Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Iron, Midori, iCab, Omniweb, Roccat, Surf, luakit...and on and on). Increasingly, mega corporations Apple and Google dominate the web, the mobile space, and Webkit is the sharp tip of their spear. Even if webkit is opensource, Apple and Google are most certainly in it for the cash mo-oney (dollar dollar bills, y'all), and that could spell dark days in the years ahead for FOSS software. Gecko is still mighty competition for Webkit, but soon it will be nothing but Firefox and community supported editions like tenfourfox, as long as Dr. Kaiser can keep up with Mozilla's twists and turns that is.

As users of a decidedly third tier platform we need all the browser we can get. That's why I became quite hot and bothered when I happened upon Netsurf, a open source browser built primarily for the RISC OS with its own rendering engine. I had only vaguely heard of the RISC OS, its a fascinating UK based operating system dating back to the 80's. Netsurf runs on almost every OS on the planet (though not on well on Windows, apparently) and will even run in a framebuffer, with no operating system or GUI requirements. It is quite modern as far HTML and CSS goes, but with no Javascript support. That, as many will tell you, is ultimately not a bad thing for a third tier OS. There is a Mac OS X PowerPC port of Netsurf, its a couple generations old but despite everything I could throw at it I couldn't get it to run on my ibook G4. I've downloaded the source code and am making it my first attempt at a compile, wish me luck. If I get it to run on Mac OS X PowerPC, I'll move over to build it for PowerPC Linux as well. If that works....who knows, maybe...dare I even say it....a Mac OS 9 port? All hail Classilla, but if there is any OS in desperate need of another browser option its the classic Mac OS.

Update : A little more digging on UK Netsurf forums and I've discovered no compile of Netsurf 2.7 for PowerPC is needed, however to even use it you need to download and install Xcode (3.1.3 is what I could find) from Apple's developer site. Xcode sets the MIME type of the CSS for Netsurf, without which the browser crashes on startup. To say this is an inelegant solution is putting it....mildly. You will also have to have an iTunes account or register a new account with the mothership to download Xcode. I haven't used iTunes in so long that I forgot my login!

My first impression of Netsurf for PowerPC: Not anywhere near as fast as webkit, most pages do not render perfectly, but all and all its not a bad little browser. Will not be my browser of choice for 10.5.8 anytime soon, however that right now is Leopard Webkit. I will now turn my attention to learning more about Framebuffers and Codewarrior in preparation for an OS 9 assualt.

PowerPC heroes

A few posts back Zen, who always tells it like it is, gave credit where credit was due and nominated some PowePC friends among us. I’d like to go a step further and nominate some PowerPC heroes among us. My definition of a hero is someone who goes above and beyond the call of duty, and these folks have certainly done that for a platform Apple abandoned many years ago now.

Cameron Kaiser

For those who don’t know Dr. Kaiser (yup, he is a bona-fide MD, with degree, and unlike this DVM can also code) is the man, the myth, the legend behind both Classilla and Tenfourfox. During the day he practices the finer medical arts on homo sapiens. At night he is almost single handedly is keeping viable browsers alive on not one, but two PowerPC operating systems. In 2013 this is no mean feat, and has required many selfless hours of coding and pathching in front of a PowerMac G5. Classilla is, for the one person reading this blog not already aware of it, the only browser anyone should be using on Mac OS 9. Now at version 9.3.2, Kaiser is focusing on a series of security rollups that will hopefully bring Classilla on a par with Mozilla 1.6 in the near future. You might not want to do your internet banking with Classilla, but for routine tasks it is surprisingly usable. Even if you don’t use or like Tenfourfox we all owe an enormous debt to Kaiser and the rest development team for keeping a Mozilla browser at source parity with Firefox in 2013. Dr. Kaiser also consistently declines all donations, as he thinks money would cloud things up. He’s probably right, but I wish I could give something other than praise and thanks to this most noble cause.

Tobias Netzel

An important contributor to Tenfourfox, Tobias is also the developer behind Leopard Webkit. Leopard Webkit gives you an up to date webkit-rendering engine in the skin of Safari 5.0.6, turning what was a terrible web browsing experience with Safari on Leopard into something…frankly awesome. The hybrid gold ringed Safari/L-webkit icon is now my go to browser on 10.5, something I would have never thought would happen.

Marc Hoyis

Marc is the guy behind Click to Plugin and I belive also now maintains Click to Flash. These are Safari extensions that give a delightful one-two punch to the most hated software ever made (that would be, I don't like to even say the word, so I'll just sign it out Freddy Mercury style...."Flash-ahh-haaaaa") and replace it with Quicktime on not only Youtube but also a surprising number of other commonly visited web sites. It may seem ridiculous at first to have both extensions installed, but as the very useful macrumors forum poster B-G discovered, Click to Flash not only blocks Flash but also presents itself to the server as Flash 11.5. This fools even the BBC, I had all but given up ever watching clips on the site in Leopard but now most video gets served up to my PowerPC mac with no complaints. The Click to Plugin extension takes over at this point and gives you several file quality playback options in either the native HTML 5 player or Quicktime. On a lower speck G4 ibook Quicktime in 360p works…awesome. You may not think 360p is all that, but Quicktime does it good. Combine that with a Quicktime Pro license and you can also download the file once it fully loads. They are just....awesome extensions.

Jeroen Diederen

Jeroen hails from the low country across the pond and is the lead developer and chief cheerleader of MintPPC. Taking a basic Debian PPC install and slapping the Mint LXDE desktop on top of it in 2009 was a stroke of genius, and has breathed new life into many an old mac. Jeroen has removed most of the major headaches from your typical Debian PPC install, though even a casual browse of the MintPPC forum will show there are still tons of issues. Most of them due to the exotic mobile hardware choices Apple made back in the day. Lets face it, Apple never intended for Linux to run on an ibook G4, and the fact that it does at all, let alone well, is pretty remarkable. Jeoroen is always helpful to those with difficult hardware, always willing to compile the applications people want for MintPPC, and never gets impatient with people less technically savvy than he. Which would be almost everyone. An honorable mention must also be made here to os911, a regular MintPPC contributor who has written some excellent installation manuals, and is also uniquely helpful, especially with old world macs and all the challenges they bring to the table.

Microsoft

Yes. That Microsoft. Microsoft still provides regular security updates for Office 2004 and 2008 for PowerPC. Apple doesn’t do anything similar for its in house apps, and credit is where credit does, the behemoth from Redmond gets some respect from a former hater.

Well, those are my nominations for PowerPC heroes. Please feel free to disagree, or nominate anyone else you think worthy in the comments and thanks again to the above for keeping this architecture “Alive and Kicking…”. Man, I just had a Freddy Mercury and a Jim Kerr moment in one post. Its officical, the Doctor is old. Very old.

Origin of the architecture name and other terms

The main misperception most people have is in thinking the "PC" in the PowerPC name means PC in the way they know.  It does not stand for personal computer.  PowerPC is an acronym for Performance optimization with enhanced risc Performance Computing.  I believe the capital P and C at the end is what leads most to think it means personal computer.

For those that don't know what "RISC" means, I can assure you it doesn't mean it takes any type of risk.  RISC and CISC are the two fundamental computer architecture bases.  RISC means reduced instruction set computer, and CISC means complex instruction set computer.  ARM, Power and PowerPC are examples of RISC.  Intel and AMD are examples of CISC.  Reduced instruction does not mean it skips things but rather that it carries more data per cycle.  CISC pipelines can be over 20 steps long compared to under 10 for most RISC architectures.  PowerPC systems, like the G4 for example, only need 7 steps in the pipeline.

Personal computer is another term that has been horrifically misused over the years.  PC is the acronym that was started for computers that could sit on a desk, in the era which most still took up whole rooms or at least an entire wall of a room.  The PC term has somehow evolved into meaning wintel/x86 hardware specifically when it really means any computer that can fit on a table.  All Mac hardware is as much a PC as any wintel system.  The sad fact is that Apple themselves have helped twist this term.  They are easily the biggest culprit in all this to be honest.  They have used the term themselves since the 80's to separate the Mac from the rest of the industry.  The proper term for a windows PC is "Wintel".  This term started to specifically mean a Windows system powered by Intel but has evolved to mean windows systems in general.  I assume this was due to Intel's dominance especially early on in the game.   

Although I respect the names of anything PowerPC related that uses the "PPC" term this is an incorrect way to refer to it.  When it comes to the technology industry as a whole most people would take PPC to mean pocket PC.  This is the term used in the CorePlayer pocket PC version and the one that fools the unknowing into thinking they have found Mac copies of it online.  For the record the Mac copy has always been named CorePlayer OS X.  To be fair to those that use PPC I cannot blame them because there are actually developers that use it so it's easy to mistake it for a legitimate acronym.  All the BSD versions available on PowerPC for example are all referred to as PPC as are several Linux distros.  Mainstream Mac software sites like MacUpdate always use PPC also. 

It was years of hearing and seeing these terms misused combined with the google search hits I get here that motivated me to write this.  It's shocking how many separate the power and pc when they type it.  It is an acronym and they don't have spaces.  So once again, the "PC" at the end of PowerPC stands for performance computing.

The doctor is in

PowerPC Liberation welcomes a new writer to the fold today.  Dr. Dave is someone you may know from his active participation as a commenter and knowledge spreader from PPC Luddite and on this blog along with several others he frequents.

Since my busy life keeps me from posting as much as I would like it was only natural to go this route.  Two heads are better than one as they say, and in this situation that is certainly an apt description.   The "Dr" in his blogger name is no front either.  He's the real deal. 

When it came time to add another author here, Dave was the first person I thought of.  He is a man of great intelligence and technical comprehension, but is far too modest to even understand that about himself.  He has a real knack for sniffing out the greatest software on earth, and has on several occasions.  It's always very cleanly coded and efficient software also, which shows he not only gets it but has no taste for bloat.  My kind of techie.

So please join me in welcoming the doctor.