Re: Little thought of today

Hello,

On Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:03:22 -0700
Andy Ruhl <[email protected]> wrote:

> I never tried macppc. Do you have a particular favorite machine? 

You didn't ask me but I'll answer anyway ;)
My favourite these days is the 15" 1.6GHz AluBook. Can take 2GB RAM,
replacing the disk with an SSD is relatively easy, R3xx Radeon is well
supported as long as you don't need drm - 2D acceleration with xrender
support -  with a display that's big enough for a bunch of xterms and
other stuff, gigabit Ethernet. And the keyboard backlight is a lot more
useful than it sounds like.
What doesn't work:
- bluetooth. It wakes up pretending to be a USB HID with paired ( by
  OSX ) keyboards / mice showing up. I don't think any OS other than
  OSX knows how to pair things.
- airport extreme. There's the bwi driver which may or may not work for
  you

As for desktops, I have a Quicksilver G4 - 64bit PCI is nice - if you
want to add faster storage, PCI-X siisata cards are easy to find and
work well. Not supported by OF but nothing keeps you from loading a
kernel via onboard ATA which then mounts its root from something else.

Then I have a 2GHz dual core G5. Works well, but so far only in 32bit
mode, so you're limited to 2GB RAM. Onboard SATA, ethernet etc. work,
same restrictions as above regarding bluetooth and wifi.
The other problem on those is graphics. Mine's got an r520 Radeon,
which is nice in OSX but unfortunately it will probably never fully
work on any open source OS on non-x86 unless AMD digs up docs and
releases them. Every driver I found so far uses x86 BIOS calls to
program the CRTC on those. Maybe someone with one of those in a PC
could run the card's ROM through a disassembler...
I got radeonfb to work on those by just running with whatever video
more OF hands us, it's probably not too difficult to do the same with
xorg, assuming switching to 32bit colour doesn't need another BIOS
call...
Otherwise, I got ahcisata and xhci cards to work, nvme SSDs require 3rd
gen PCIe though, which this machine doesn't have.

G4 and G5 SMP works pretty well these days.

> I haven't had one in a very long time. The mini seems nice.

They're more or less iBooks without displays. The firmware is weird
when it comes to netbooting, otherwise you get X with hw xrender, but
opening them is a pain.
Also, one of mine started overheating, turned out the CPU heatsink was
held in place by four little plastic bolts, which got brittle after 20+
years and broke. Replacing them with a bunch of M3 screws is easy
enough once you get the case open.
After that it's up to 1GB RAM, and mSATA SSDs and 44pin IDE to mSATA
adaptors are cheap.

have fun
Michael