Re: OldWorld ROM Macintoshes

Hello,

On Tue, 2025-09-09 at 08:02 -0600, Stan Johnson wrote:
> Thanks, that's good information. The reason I kept systemd for these
> tests in Debian is that an increasing number of Debian packages are
> being compiled to require systemd. For example, as far as I know, Xfce
> is the last desktop environment (other than twm) that doesn't require
> systemd in Debian. Even the lightdm display manager seems to require
> systemd, though it appears that wdm and xdm do not. I wanted to confirm
> that X11 still breaks on the Wallstreet even when systemd is being used.

I'm pretty sure lightdm depends on logind, but not systemd but I could
be wrong. Did you try installing elogind as a replacement?

> Anyway, systemd is great for large systems with gigabytes of memory, but
> not so much for small systems that are memory-constrained (such as m68k
> and most powerpc, certainly all m68 and G3/G4 PowerBooks). I've used
> systemd successfully on a two-processor PowerMac G5 with 8 GiB memory,
> but even there sysvinit is noticeably faster.

systemd can run very well on memory-constrained systems if you take the
time to configure it. It enables a lot of services and features by default
that you can just disable.

> Not being an expert in systemd, I wish there were some tools to convert
> systemd services to sysvinit scripts (perhaps there are and I just don't
> know about them).

I don't think this is reasonably possible except for very simple service
files. The problem is that SysVInit uses bash scripts while systemd uses
a declarative format which doesn't contain any executable code.

> Anyway, I'll keep using Debian distributions as long as they offer a
> choice of init programs. Gentoo is also a good option, though X11 there
> is more of a hassle to set up. I got it working in Gentoo by using twm;
> performance is mostly comparable to modern systems, except for the
> limited features of twm.
> 
> I would also add that it's a good idea for every system to have a rescue
> partition (I use Debian and Gentoo, so they can rescue each other if
> needed). And a working copy of dump/restore to copy filesystems between
> systems is helpful. Yes, I know there are issues using the same SSH
> setup on multiple systems, but I've mostly given up on SSH anyway at
> this point, especially on old hardware. Not only is it slow, but the SSH
> developers keep making new versions incompatible with old versions. So I
> mostly use telnet and ftp. Of course, cleartext passwords are a bad idea
> and shouldn't be used on any Internet-facing systems.

You should be able to enable old ciphers and algorithms on the SSH command
line to be able to connect to a server using an older version of the SSH
server.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913