Can an iMac G3 with OpenBSD be my daily driver?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 20 авг 2024
- Thanks PCBWay.com - Today we're installing the latest version of OpenBSD 7.0 - from 2021! - on a 333mhz iMac G3 from 1999. That's right - a totally modern OS! And in the spirit of the PowerPC Challenge, I want to see just how modern of a computing experience we can eek out of this thing.
Thanks for the cameo, @BranchusCreations!
Thank you PCBWay for sponsoring today's retrospective!
www.pcbway.com/
VIDEO LINKS:
🍎 OpenBSD macppc: www.openbsd.or...
🍎 Optimizing OpenBSD (geared towards laptops): www.c0ffee.net...
🍎 Old article about OpenBSD on an iMac: www.increasing...
🍎 Mac Yak PowerPC Challenge: tinkerdifferen...
══════════════════════════
💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: www.youtube.co...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
══════════════════════════
Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com...
══════════════════════════
💬 Come talk about old computers on the Action Retro Discord! / discord
══════════════════════════
#PowerPCChallenge #OpenBSD #iMacG3
"Hey smokers. Today we'll be taking a look at this vintage PowerPC Macintosh G3 and trying to get OpenBSD to run on it..." xD
If only... I wish he made more videos.
Title: “Installing an SSD in a iMac G3”
Time: 2:37:00
Who is this in reference to
@@Slipfox_xyz Druaga1
i noticed it too
This takes me back! When I was in middle school in around 2011-12, the only computers I could afford were these old iBook G3s that were being sold in bulk from presumably a school district that was emptying out their dead tech storage. I got 3 for $25 and was determined to turn them into usable machines, so I installed a bunch of different distros of linux, but settled on debian and lightweight desktop environments/window managers as they only had 128mb of RAM each. Getting xorg properly configured was such a pain I remember, it was what forced me to truly learn bash. I did end up with computers capable of use as kitchen computers, which I was real proud of.
I miss druaga1 too. There's a special magic to someone who eschews fancy expensive cases and builds his computers in cardboard boxes.
Exactly!
You're all making it sound like Druaga is gone!
Sure... he may not upload all that often...
but he's still around! The man, nor his channel are dead!
That said... I do still miss when he had regular uploads...
wat happen to him?
@@noobershaggus Don't know. He just hasn't posted for a long time.
he posted a while ago about being burned out and stopping/slowing down for his health. i have a feeling he will post something again eventually..
I'm running OpenBSD on an Apple iBook G3 for the last 10 years, and it's great. I use WindowManager, as it is kind of similar to the origin of MacOS X GUI (NextStep) and lightweight. Great video!
Well I sadly don’t have any power Macs anymore but did use one from 2003-2009 than switched to a pc than back to Mac which I used a 7,1 MacBook Pro 2.4 ghz,12gb of ram, and a NVIDIA 320m gpu with 256mb. I used that machine until 2021 of December. Now I use a M1 MacBook Air and a hp pavilion eh1070wm and Ryzen 7 5700u 8core cpu with and Vega 8, and with 32gb of ram. Hopefully those two machines I can get about 8 plus years out of those too. I do like to do experiments kind of like what retro does on the 2010 MacBook still plenty usable for a core two duo laptop for daily use if I had to. Macs definitely last forever not sure about the newer ones.
You mean WindowMaker?
@@korgied Uh, thanks, sorry, yes, WindowMaker :)
@@planetm68k82 I used to use WindowMaker back in the late 90's, a lightweight wm with impressive themes back when 16 MB of RAM was the norm at least in the 3rd world.
I was using it on a powermac g4. with CDE, which seemed to be better and use less resources than wimaker until the devs broke it in 7.x..
back to windowmaker now.
Its a shame about windowmaker. It used to be so much more than just a WM. It could be extended into a desktop and connect with the gnustep environment, they took out support for a lot of that stuff :/
Openbsd team has been removing a lot of lightweight pkgs so gonna move Os soon
I wonder if swapping to an 80 wire IDE cable would fix your drive problems. That is what you have to do to use a SATA/IDE adapter in an original Xbox.
Was wondering the same thing.
Lol, MattKC just had to do that in a vid he put out yesterday
Came here to write the same suggestion, it's definitely worth trying out.
Yeah I've watched many Xbox modding videos and it's quite an issue for people trying to find a cable that routes properly (I don't intend in modding my xbox tho as it already has a hardmod and is fine how it is
No it won't help. The problem is no AHCI support in that computer's disk controller.
Oh fun! I've been dabbling with OpenBSD lately. It's great how it's so simultaneously "old-skool", and yet and I can get pretty modern stuff running on it with minimal effort. Related: I fixed soooo many CRT iMacs when I was in high school. Everytime there was a big lightning storm there would be dozen computers with fried modems or power supplies, often one of them was an iMac. Much faster once you memorized the steps and screw locations. :)
In my experience the all in one design necessitating only one power outlet led to surge protectors bring forgone by people who thought port replication was their only function
I always laugh at the Druaga1 references. Wish he'd start uploading nonsense again.
Definitely! I miss his videos.
I used to be subscribed to his channel. What happened to him?
23 year-old. Wow! Time flies.
I have well memories of IceWM which I sometimes still start for the nostalgia. Used it on my Pentium 200 with 48MB of RAM when I got my first Linux disc to try out.
Also yes, that theme you used truly is the coolest of stock IceWM themes.
Your appearance in the most recent episode of The Retro Hour Podcast was cool also, really enjoy that podcast in general.
I remember using IceWM for pretty long time, actually. The biggest issue with it was that it was synchronous/single-threaded. So - when moving window with, say video playing in it - video paused playing for the time window was moved.
One cool thing about IceWM is it's still developed. Latest release is from last month. Even FVWM is still actively developed.
IceWM is very underrated.
Was not expecting an OpenBSD video from you! We'll done!
I used to run OpenBSD on one of my PowerMac G4s as a web server in the min-2000s and a few years ago decided to try it again - on desktop, this time - as I was migrating old OS X Server (née Mac OS X Server) web servers to OpenBSD VMs. I've was running it as my primary desktop OS on a 2012 i7 Mac mini since OpenBSD 6.5 and now on a 2013 Mac Pro since 6.9. The Mac mini was super stable and quick, but the integrated Intel graphics were a bit slow when it came to infrequent gaming. The Mac Pro has been a bit unstable due to some issues with the HDMI audio (which is not even used) on the dual AMD D300 graphics cards occasionally "disconnecting", but otherwise it's extremely fast and has good 3D performance for my uses.
I still have 2000 PowerBook G3 (FireWire) kicking around that I keep thinking of trying OpenBSD on for PPC development & testing. I have an old Dell Latitute PIII laptop that I have OpenBSD i386 installed on for the same purpose.
A couple years ago I was able to get ahold of Takashi HASEGAWA and he granted me approval to pick up development of MLVWM (the Macintosh-Like Virtual Window Manager), which was based on FVWM back in 1997, since I've been running that as my primary WM. I maintain the OpenBSD mlvwm port, so you can even install it via `pkg_add mlvwm`. I haven't gotten around to updating NetBSD/FreeBSD/etc ports, so they're in varying states, most running Takashi HASEGAWA's final version from 2000. I also maintain an `mlvwmrc` project which contains configuration files for many X11 applications and welcome contributions or requests.
Woah that's so cool! I'll definitely check out MLVWM :)
Interesting. The browsing experience with NetSurf seems to be much better and faster on your G3 mac than on my Sun Blade 1000 workstation from year 2000 which has dual 750 MHz UltraSparc III and 8 GB of RAM (running OpenBSD)
Sun hardware built back in the day may never actually die.
@@crapphone7744 What is dead may never die! 🤓
@@zehph lol, and with strange aeons even death may die. H.P. Lovecraft😄
@@zehph It's a line from a horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft who wrote in the 1920s. The couplet is from a fictional book with horrifying secrets and is as follows; “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Nice.
ATI driver issues is due to the dropped support of old GPU's recently from mesa/Radeon. If G3 falls before the cutoff date, as its considered unsupported due to code bitrot. It was never updated to conform with code changes over the last 15 years, as a result it was depreciated for the last 4 years before being removed in the last 6 months.
Beyond that, you may be using the wrong driver name (it may be Radeon instead of ATI). Naming conventions of Xorg video drivers have changed since 2017. So old info is wrong.
Lastly Xorg has a auto-configure option. you can use that to get things outside the driver config (monitor, layout, etc.) | for more info on drivers Phoronix has discussed the RAGE 128 alot, so you can find details there.
Xorg performs the same on all POSIX compliant OS's. BSD and Linux are equal in the Xorg world.
Yes; Xorg used to automatically write an Xorg.conf on first startup, now it just creates a little stub file with almost no information and does the configuration on each boot. There is a command to get it to write the auto-detected information to the Xorg.conf, which would get you very close to a correct and working Xorg.conf for this iMac.
It's just a shame that I had the same problem back in 2005 and it never really got fixed, hence we still must mess around with an Xorg.conf like barbarians.
@@3rdalbum such is life on the g3...
The iMac G3 uses either a Rage IIc or a Rage Pro Turbo, not a Rage 128.
This might have been a bigger part of the issue.
Great Branchus, that was a fearsome cameo!
Great, I love this video series showing how old Macs can still be functional today, I would love to see the beige beast, or NetBSD on 68040 system.
Commodore Amiga 4000
We actually had an Amiga 1200 running NetBSD with apache and hosted our amiga club forum with xoops in it. It was slow but super fun.
even dos would be better than netbsd
@@noobershaggusNo, DOS would be a downgrade for any system, no matter what the hardware or how old it is. DOS has only one redeeming feature... it's a dead OS. 😂
@@another3997 That is highly opinion based and situational
Some of the G3 iMacs had a firmware update that changed some available video settings to prevent bricking them when installing OS X. You may want to search around to see if yours is affected. Also these use the RAGE 3D or RAGE IIc, not a RAGE 128 (those are in the slot loaders). You may want to try drivers/configs for the MACH64 family instead of the RAGE 128 since these older chips are closer to the m64. As for the flash storage, try to set any of your SATA adapters to 1.5G/SATA-1 and disable SSC if possible.
Thank you for these suggestions!!
Night need to use an older (SATA II) ssd as I had that problem in my g5
Thanks Sean, I definitely wasn't expecting to sit down and add "get trolled by Action Retro over the pronunciation of Bondi" to my list of things to happen to me this morning, haha
I love the BSDs and FVWM as well. Great video.
When you were sharing the headaches of getting Xorg running, you reminded me of my gentoo install on an old Pentium III PC I had in 2004 with an ATi graphics card. The first thing I thought was "Did you get hardware acceleration working?" I remember having to download the driver from a CVS repository the latest build for my GPU and compile by hand, then specify it in my Xorg.conf. The overwhelming joy I felt when I could run glxgears with hardware acceleration after all that was among the biggest moments in my life. It was a moment where the universe was telling me I could do this for a living. It took me weeks of trial and error that I'll never get back, but after nearly 20 years as a *nix engineer, it was invaluable training. Great job on the build and video!
I would like to see more stuff done with this operating system. Here are my suggestions:
1. spreadsheets
2. word processing
3. gaming (NES emulation, native games, etc...)
4. Python programming
5. Video playback
6. Ripping an audio CD
7. MP3 and/or AAC playback
I can't understand why he didn't try video, especially after seeing Dillo scroll smoothly and windows move smoothly under IceWM. :) But video playback depends very much on the encoding. Some people use encodings which take, like, 10 times the CPU power for a 5% reduction in file size; insanely annoying. I would have liked to see him try DVDs which don't have that problem at all.
From experience back when these machines were new, I doubt there would be any problems at all with ripping an audio CD or MP3 playback. Python programming I'm not quite so sure about, but I suspect Python 3 may be faster than Python 1 was back in the day. Python 1 was fine when it got going, but took time to load. It's very likely the main issue will be what your program does rather than Python itself.
I'd expect LibreOffice to be virtually unusable; it can be horribly slow on almost modern computers, but I'm sure there are other word processors and spreadsheets which will run better. The catch with the others is they may not have the features any particular person may want. I think it's best to test those yourself. Memory always was the biggest limiting factor; you can set up a low-memory virtual machine with Qemu or Virtual Box or something.
For gaming, it depends on how the game or emulator is coded. I think it quite likely that iMac could handle OpenTTD which can draw hundreds of moving trains in several open windows along with the main display. My Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200 could; it's less powerful. On the other hand, a game coded with the expectation that the graphics hardware will do the work may struggle to draw one simple animation at a time. (I should probably say my experience with OpenTTD may be out of date. :)
Anyway, I've used NES and Gameboy emulators under the 9front operating system which also only supported framebuffer graphics on my machines. The emulators worked fine on some machines, but on others the BIOS didn't enable CPU caching for the framebuffer so graphics were slow. I don't think that would be a problem with OpenBSD, I think it'll enable CPU caching itself. (I think 9front does now, but I'm not sure.)
@@eekee6034 You have to remember though that the iMac G3 (all of them, iirc) use some variant of the Rage 128 GPU chipset. Ever since the very first record of someone installing Linux on an iMac, NOBODY has ever been able to get full GPU performance out of their iMac G3, simply due to the GPU driver not fully supporting the Mac variant of the Rage 128. In fact, if you skip to the part in the video, where you see @Action Retro showing his Xorg config file, you'll see the section in it where ForcePCIMode is set to 'true'. This means that the GPU won't be able to help at all with video playback at any useable speed..... think of how old classic, beige Macs used to be, that didn't ship with a graphics card, but instead relied on a portion of system RAM to serve as a framebuffer for rendering the graphics. What few Rage 128 ('r128') driver optimizations have been added between 1997 to today (2022), quite frankly, do nothing to solve the problem of getting Linux to get the GPU to run at whatever AGP speeds they are actually rated for...... unfortunately.
@@eekee6034 You used Python 1 back in the day? What system did you use it on?
Also for video playback I'm sure he should be able to play a simple mpeg file. That would have been neat to see.
For LibreOffice I always thought it was pretty good, but I haven't used it in a while to be honest.
That was super fun! I used OpenBSD around 2003, as I switched over from full time Mac usage. I also tried many Linuces and now run various Ubunti. Well done! I adore the graphical match of that desktop to the look of the candy computer.
What a sad downgrade
I just found your channel with all of these PowerPC videos and I LOVE all of them!! So awesome to see modern software running on these old machines :) Keep up the awesome work and I look forward to more PowerPC content!
I use OpenBSD since beginning - For me trick is to use Unixy wm - not windows-like ones. Good file manager like Worker for example.
Super stable and with Window Maker for example, feels like home for me ( used CDE on Solaris a lot and IRIX on SGIs).
I use OpenBSD on Modern laptops daily.
I prefer rox-filer for my file manager (When not using the console), but I can second using window maker, used it for a looong time.
This reminds me I like Eagle Mode for managing files. It makes traditional file managers seem like groping around in the dark almost as badly as a command line does. ;) It works very well on Linux and Mac.
I love this sort of content. I remember playing with alternative OS on my original Bondi Blue iMac G3 back in the day. Really takes me back.
i miss mine so much. i'd trade my gaming pc for one fr
I had the original "Bondi Blue" iMac, and loved it. I hated it when it finally died on me.
I always wanted one of those "Grape" ones. :) Purple is my favorite color. :)
FYI, the 266 and 333 MHz (Rev C and D) have a Rage Pro chipset, not Rage 128
Thanks for the Gentoo shoutout! :) Adventurous indeed!
I’m happy that I was the original thumbnail:) Strongly going to 50K
I love these old iMacs to death. I had one that I used when I was 5 and they had them in my elementary school, which was the coolest to me as a kid. The iMacs and eMacs in the computer lab loved the spinning beach ball of death but it's memorable to me now as an adult. It amazes me how much effort people put into making old computers work with modern-ish software.
yeah me too. i miss mine, would trade my gaming pc for one in a second
@@noobershaggus The nostalgia is too strong lol
I appreciate your nods to other fellow RUclipsrs that share your hobby. Great video as always!
Greetings from PA! Fantastic video - well done. I tried out OpenBSD in a PowerBook G4 a few years ago. Installed smoothly and ran smoothly but I didn’t use it much. Hafta give it another go.
The llvmpipe in neofetch means all rendering is being done via CPU.
he did mention that there's no graphics acceleration
Hmm.. proof that a modern GUI OS does _not_ have to be _bloatware_ to be "full featured". Nice, thanks for going to the effort.
i love the fact that you can browse the web on an old machine, love the vintage computers
Honestly that performance is reallly nice . I used to surf the net on a power Mac 5500 and a variety of p2/p3 machines in the early 2000s and websites were around that slow
In those days, people were mostly limited by network bandwidth, and dial up modems were common. With this system, the CPU appears to be the bottleneck, as modern websites have lots of CSS styling to chug through. I can't even imagine how slow it would be with JavaScript enabled!
Great video! So impressive to see the iMac G3 running BSD, and browsing the net normally with it! Once I'm done with this semesters finals, I will try to get it running on mine iMac too, and since daily uni work won't be a problem then - mayhaps even taking on the challenge to use it as a daily driver :D
I remember FVWM I use to use it a lot. I use to use Slackware in 1995 and had setup Xorg so often. I remember it being more difficult in setting mode lines for the monitor and stuff with a mode line for each resolution or something. I remember fiddling with the mode lines for some of my graphics cards that did not work out of the box.
Oof! Mode lines... I've done my time with them. XD I once bought a weird monitor and had to figure out a suitable mode line by trial and error. It turned out to be fixed to a 60Hz frame rate, and the best resolution I could get out of it was 1365x1024.
Congratulations on getting it going, you're a very patient man. If it was me it would have been sailing out of the window about 5 hours in to the xorg config... ;)
I feel like this is a good video to comment this, I discovered your channel several months back and started watching your backlog. While I have never really been a Mac user, I enjoyed your videos and ended up picking up a G3 someone was selling locally. I got it complete in box for only $100. Used to use them in school back in the day, so it's been a blast from the past using one again. Oh and I also ended up getting a modern Mac too. So much for not really a Mac user.
MorphOS is most modern OS for certain PPC Macs. At least, still actively developed. Version 3.16 is expected very soon.
G4 and G5 only.
I'd love to see him try MorphOS. I'm sure he has another Mac that can run it. It's such a fast and efficient OS.
I adore modern OSes on old hardware, or old software on new hardware. My windows 7 era office pc shreds windows xp era games. And the idea of making modern, necessity-based use of "outdated" hardware should be the dream of all recyclers.
Amazing work! A neofetch screenshot like that is legendary... A truly modern OS release running with graphics on such ancient and unsupported hardware....wow.
I haven't booted OpenBSD on my iMac G3 in a while, but I remember having a similar issue with the ati driver under 5.x. You may have better luck specifying r128 in your xorg.conf as I believe that ati is just a stub that tries to autodetect whether to use e.g. r128, mach, radeon, etc. That got me basic 2D acceleration, though its anyone's guess if dri supports opengl on such an old card anymore (I would say probably not). Awesome video, thanks for trying to keep these old machines alive and for giving OpenBSD a chance :)
Wow, near perfect timing with this video! Over the weekend, I tried replacing the hard drive in my Lombard PowerBook G3 with an mSATA SSD (inside an mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapter). After cloning the original drive, and installing the SSD, my PowerBook was able to see my installed OSes on the multi-boot menu; however, it couldn't boot into either of them. The OS X and OS 9 install disks couldn't [or in the case of OS 9, could barely] detect the drive. Using a CF card adapter, instead, worked seamlessly. Now, I just have to find a new use for my mSATA drive and adapter.
Openfirmware on the early G3's can't access beyond 8GB, so you'd have to make sure the partitions required for booting are in the first 8GB of the drive.
Oddly, OpenBSD apparently doesn't auto create a separate boot partition, but it suggested a 1GB root partition that was the first partition, so it would have been in the first 8GB.
What a ridiculous partition layout, though. No way would I be ok with what it suggested.
@@korgied Makes sense. I was looking at the Linux install docs to verify the 8GB limit. They say that "/ or more specifically /boot needs to be in the first 8GB". I'm not familiar enough with OpenBSD to troubleshoot the boot process. 🙂
@@korgied OpenBSD is almost obsessional about security. It suggests all those partitions so writing or execution can be restricted at the partition level.
one of my best accomplishments as a teen was getting NetBSD running on a Macintosh IIcx. Took i think more than a whole day to install, but i even got X11 working on it. unfortunately it was not really that useful lol
Gosh, you really went through a lot of adapters. Lord you did a lot of work. Bless you sir! ✨⭐🌟
By the way, I am pretty blown away by this demo. WOW!
The moment you pullled out nano blue, the whole ting went from 1990 to 2006. Crazy!
Attaboy Puffy!! It's amazing how lean OpenBSD is.
thumbs up for mentioning druagr1. i miss that guy, always loved his vibe
Just watching some of your older videos. This brings back memories. I used to have a Power Mac 8500 with dual processors and used some earlier Linux attempts on that machine.
I'm somewhat impressed you got that CD drive working. I seem to remember having no luck getting discs to boot on an early iMac with a non-Apple firmware drive.
You can't use an off the shelf SATA SSD with such a computer because they require a disk controller that supports AHCI. No matter the SATA to IDE adapter you use, it won't work. Even if the disk controller sees the disk. Some early SSDs didn't require AHCI and you can also find IDE/PATA SSDs which will work fine.
It's getting harder to find PATA SSDs nowadays.
I had a white one of those, it was a bit higher spec though. 600MHz with 1GB of RAM along with a 7200 speed HDD. It doesn't exist anymore but somebody wrapped up Ubuntu into something they called MintPPC and it worked okay for what it was. It wasn't playing youtube or anything. It was a good proof of concept. I miss it. In the end I settled on OS 9
Oh, yeah. I bought an expensive SSD for it, a whole 30GB (so you know this was a while ago). It totally didn't work at all, just like all your adapters. I never could figure out why. That's why I settled with the 7200 speed HDD
I put MintPPC on my 500Mhz iMac years ago too, had to wget a xorg conf like in the video here as well - alas, Mint lasted a day - too slow, went back to OS9/X
Years ago when I worked at a newspaper I used OpenBSD on all my servers. I had an extra imac on my desk that I used as a test machine for testing things like the corporate OpenLDAP and things like that.
fun fact! a fan project to make youtube look like a 2009 version makes youtube watchable on older macs! (tested myself on my Imac g4 17 inch)
I’m surprised you didn’t use MLVWM to make it look like it was running Mac OS 7 or 8
I'm a prolific user of OpenBSD on powerpc hardware. Runs really well on a mac mini
I literally yelled out "IT'S BOND-DIE!!" when you said bond-dee blue.
Great video, I hope to see more like this. I’m looking for reasons to not get rid of my powerbook and this videos plus the other about adelie are making me want to try them both. Please do more of this.
I should dig out my G4 tower and start messing with it. I didn't have the time before, but Winter is here.
Druaga1 mention hell yeah
My nostalgia for these old computers is strong, but when I have one I can't imagine what I would actually do with it
Probably better off installing a classic Mac OS and playing Taskmaker or something like that. :P
there is only suffering, but you won't realize it until you are too deep
@@pc_panic this is true, i just picked up 2 g3s and a g4 lmao
Mfw the hands actually have a full human attached to them.
OpenBSD install tip: Always choose "no" at "is the disk already mounted?" message. OpenBSD install runs from a ram disk so the file sets part isn´t actually mounted. Choose "no" and it helps you with it.
Really nice to see how good OpenBSD run on that old G3. Thanks for giving me the inspiration to try it on my old PM G5.
OpenBSD is by far the best OS out there. It´s the only way to stay sane sometimes. (and it´s a good way to make me a subscriber... :) Thanks alot for doing OpenBSD content.
I wish IBM still did PowerPC for their modern chips. I really liked working with them. I have an old dual proc G4 800 and an ibook g3 in storage and I really want to get them running something. Guess OpenBSD is my best bet.
Can't wait for your Linux From Scratch install guide video on this machine. 🙃
Great to see your face!
I despise how picky my iMac G3 is wrt SSD's and what nots. I trialed and errored quite a few different combinations, but still haven't found one that works. Just got to keep at it, I guess.
I worked at a warranty center for apple in 1999 - 2000. I would forget the discharge the tube from time to time. Good times.. Shockingly good.
I had to laugh at the "bon-dai" bit. I learned the correct pronunciation a few years ago after saying "bondy" for two decades 😆
Well done on making your informative video. The single IDE port _(splitting into two via a ribbon cable)_ is merely UDMA-33 but the firewire is at least 400Mbps and is bootable, if your model has the IEEE1394 ports _(and if not then the Harmoni-G3 addon can upgrade for that allowing firewire, 512MB RAM and a 500MHz CPU)._ If others want to try this, it is possible not only to network boot of the firewire (or HDD/SSD boot) but also to upgrade the RAM and have 4 hard-drives in ZFS by putting both a HardDrive (e.g. HDD) on the ribbon cable IDE _(e.g. via SATA conversion or simply PATA while aiming for at least 8MB cache on the Hard-Drive)_ and two drives on the Firewire ports _(without even needing to daisy chain IEEE1394 devices)._ The inital boot can be triggered from the RJ45 and then into a USB port _(an HDD/NAND deive not included in the ZFS array but capable of having persistence to store settings)_ which then loads the remainder data from the aforementioned ZFS four drives array. You need 1GB RAM per 1TB ZFS storage, so upgrading to say 512MB could allow for 512GB Hard-drive storage so each drive _(in the IDE and IEEE1384 drives)_ is under 128GB _(partitioning or jumper-restricting down the storage capacity if needed)_ to play it safe for RAM elbow-room. One of the drives would be the index. This information is to be helpful. Your model might not have the firewire and so this info is for those who have that _(usually on models over 350MHz CPU or 400MHz)._ I wouldn't expect trim on a CF card. In theory, if network booting, you could have a tape drive _(or another pc or raspberry-pi for emulation of one)_ send and recieve a square-wave via the audio input-output mic-line to save settings in the way a FreeNAS CDROM-Booting older computer could save settings to a floppy _(and it would be cool if BSD and Linux for that Mac and for PC had that as an option on the distro ISO with software for a RaspberryPi and amd64 SBC to "pretend" to be a tape drive to read-write data and recieve instructions from the Mac-or-PC)._
You should btw be able to use a wrapper-class (or struct) for a graphics driver for your ATI btw _(although it'd be cool if BSD wrote a driver for yours to work out the box)._Try NDISWrapper on the airport (or a wifi/bluetooth) if you need (or the modem). The modem and the VGA output (if soldered on) can use serial signals and be driven over say a modded null modem cable. An Audio device culd be run over the bluetooth in addition to PAN.
As an aside, for the PC instead of Mac, a 256MB RAM (or higher) Linux distro worth noting is Kwort linux (alike to slackware) and it is commonly found on an ISO that fits on a CD.
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love.
Gosh, I used to support 6 of those at work back in the early 2000s. I remember having to replace a couple of hard drives and remove small CDs from the slot loading drive.
Taking those things apart was always a pain in the neck.
and people told me i was crazy because i run some pcs with core 2 quads lmao. You are a real 100% mad respect
Really informative and inspiring. Great video and review. 10/10
i like the new background!
>Slick looking modern operating system
>Looks like windows vista
I like this style tho
Really enjoyed this video and respect the amount of time you spent getting everything to work. I can totally relate to this obsessiveness. 😜👏
The original Rev A-D iMac's didn't use Rage 128 graphics, they used the Rage II on the Rev. A Bondi model and Rage Pro on the B-D.
My 400mhz slot loader runs 1024mb RAM... that's one gigabyte to you youngsters. It ran Debian until they dropped 32bit PPC support... I had lots of fun getting the sound to work. Now it runs MacOS 10.3.9 again.
PS: Your desktop environment is really just a fancy window manager.
If your hardware works with openbsd that is fine. Linux has a lot more developers maybe I am wrong but I would think it would work with a lot more devices than any of the BSD's.
Yeah. The problem is differences in attitudes and goals. Since early times, Linux has intentionally allowed for constant change inside the kernel. This is a problem for anyone who just wants a hobby. Linux also has a lot of Serious Business Commercial Input, so it has to keep up. The two together make it necessary to drop old code. OpenBSD's core maintainer, on the other hand, has been heard to say, "All I wanted was a hobby." ;)
XOrg is very much more like Linux than OpenBSD in these aspects, explaining why there were problems getting the graphics going.
OpenBSD is awesome they remove more code than add most of the time which many projects fail to do I think
I know this isn't really entirely on topic but it's related and I like your channel so you can always use more comments:
I wanted to get it running in a Mac Pro 3,1 but between EFI vs OpenCore (OC) vs OC+ReFind
and OpenBSD won't boot with an image for UEFI (even with opencore) but will install using the iso for non-UEFI (when you already have OC installed!) but then won't boot...
The amount of time (and lack of a YT channel to share!) means that old (~$15 - $20 !!!) machine is becoming a "try some Linux distros" piece (with maybe the latest OC-supported Mac OS on a drive).
The space could use a friendly bunch of docs for bridging the gaps given Apple, even once it began using PC hardware, still did "different" if only to make using their hardware with anything else..."difficult." (Their very recent platform being exceptional in that way since they released docs so extensive that both the BSD and Linux people got things running overnight!)
Nice work Sean
Still got my 'iMac DV SE Snow'. Love it to bits, and still use it for film-scanning.
I remember in 1999 getting my first iMac G3 400 MHz system and telling everybody about how smooth and wonderful machine it was compared to the windows machines of the time and everyone that I had that used it ended up buying an apple.
The Grape iMac G3 was the 1st Apple product I ever encountered as a kid, got to play Nanosaur on it and messed around on the early web with Netscape.
i am so glad i missed out on manually configuring xorg, that whole process seems like hell
Getting any version of BSD to run on any computer is a major pain in the backside !!!
If you're going to use a SATA to IDE adapter, use an ATA-133 ribbon and it'll make persnickety devices happier.
FVWM is extremely customizable and can be made to look and work more like that IceWM install, too. But IceWM is cool also. On PCs, Linux is waaaay faster than OpenBSD, but perhaps OpenBSD can put up more of a fight on single-core systems (or on older architectures which Linux has been dropping support for over the past few years). Not even FreeBSD or DragonflyBSD can touch Linux performance on a modern system, let alone OpenBSD or NetBSD.
OpenBSD's focus is security rather than performance, but it seems to do a good job of being easy to manage.
i definitely need to do this, i went to pickup one of these imacs recently so i could play some nanosaur and somehow wound up with 6 of them. slot not tray.
Wow totally impressed
Next chalenge! BSD on PPC 603e, 603 and 601!! :D
OpenBSD only supports new world Macs (iMac g3 and newer), but NetBSD actually supports quite a few old world Macs as well.
GTK3 causes a significant performance hit
Fun fact about the yellow molex connector for the hard drive: it's not yellowed, it's just yellow. It's always been that color for no reason i could discern.
FreeBSD has the desktop-installer package which makes installing a desktop MUCH easier.
Great stuff man!!!
The colour for this Mac is Grape actually. Netsurf is a webkit browser so basically Safari.
2 things... 1. There are IDE SSDs that don't need an adapter, which might work. 2. I found that if you wanna run anything today you can't really get away with less than 1gb of RAM, and even then just installing any OS other than BSD or Debian is a hassle. I couldn't even get the install iso of Arch to boot a few days ago. Why? They try to put the whole install environment into RAM, leading to a crash. Some distros are nice enough to tell you, others just get stuck without any indication of it.
My iMac G3 is 2nd generation (slot-loading) and I did not have any problems with an inexpensive IDE adapter and a cheap SSD. Video configuration was less picky too (I think I used the same page mentioned on the video as reference)