NetBSD 10.1 on my iBook G4 12"

[Lastic]

Here we are still experimenting with my iBook G4 , 12" , 1 Ghz , 1.25GB RAM an an mSATA SSD.

These past 2 months I've tried Adelie/T2SE/Debian SID/Leopard/OpenBSD

I've boiled down my requirements to

mplayer
default Window Manager
w3m-img for the simple websites
current yt-dlp
badwolf or vimb (Webkit-GTK browsers) for Javascript
hatari for Atari ST emulation
not there yet but mesa-amber aka accelerated GL graphics
aria2c
sixel support in terminal
yewtube

Latest run has been the BSD's

OpenBSD 7.8
older version of yt-dlp, badwolf crashes maybe because of the strict memory limiting in OpenBSD, bwi (Airport Extreme 802.11g) was
flaky, usb 802.11n adapters are capped to 802.11g

OpenBSD 7.9
had to wait a while until binary packages became available but badwolf had to compile from source and somewhere around gtk or webkit
it failed . Current selection of binary installs was too small for my personal liking.

OpenBSD 7.1
The one with MESA that still supports accelerated Radeon but helas getting newer versions of software installed is a no-go

NetBSD 11RC4

Too much has still to be be built from source and fails.

So then we arrive at NetBSD 10.1 an end of 2025 release.

After 2 installs I have figured out the best practices, if anybody wants them let me know, I'll post them here.

I'm lucky that my CD-drive still works in my iBook.

To be continued as I further explore NetBSD and its own quirks 🙂

 

[Andrew-R]

Here we are still experimenting with my iBook G4 , 12" , 1 Ghz , 1.25GB RAM an an mSATA SSD.


After 2 installs I have figured out the best practices, if anybody wants them let me know, I'll post them here.

I'm lucky that my CD-drive still works in my iBook.

To be continued as I further explore NetBSD and its own quirks 🙂

yes I want 🙂

Please post as time permit!

 

[Lastic]

Ok here they are , I had them prepared but wasn't sure to include them in the first post of this topic ( length )

Be sure to read them first before plunging into an install and feel free to shoot questions first before wiping your entire harddisk 🙂

IMPORTANT TO NOTE NetBSD might not be your cup of tea, I'll post my personal experiences later on today.

For laptops SLEEP/SUSPEND/HIBERNATE does not work, the build-in Airport Wireless does not work well
and there is no Altivec or mesa accelerated Graphics like on OS X Tiger/Leopard.

Wifi is not yet covered here so you will need wired Ethernet if you want to install/use it .

If you want to check out the packages that are available to install via pkgin first (binaries so no source compilation)

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/powerpc/10.0_2025Q2/All/

The guide is like in a typical BSD fashion overly documented which is good but overwhelming for a novice user.

Installation procedure for NetBSD/macppc 10.1

Partitioning took me 3 times to get it right, only installing NetBSD no dual-boot onto an iBook G4 with a working CDROM.

Burn the install media onto a CD-ROM from here


==Boot into OS X

I have a CompactFlash Firewire OS X installation which I used to boot into since you cannot wipe your harddisk that you are booting from !

If you have another Mac you could use Target Mode via Firewire to mount the harddisk of the machine on which
you want to install NetBSD.

Open Disk Utility ,create 2 partitions , the first being Apple Journaled Extended aka HFS+ , shrink it down as small as it can go. I gave it the name boot as to easily identify it later.

I could not choose MB in the graphical GUI of Disk utilty so I used command line to create a 512 MB HFS+ partition, rest as free space.


Open Terminal.

Run the command to list your drives:

diskutil list

Locate the identifier for the partition you want to resize (e.g., /dev/disk2s2).

Resize the partition using the diskutil resizeVolume command.
Replace X and Y by your partition that you saw listed.

diskutil resizeVolume /dev/diskXsY 512M

Download the netbsd-GENERIC.gz and ofwboot.xcf

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-10.1/macppc/binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC.gz

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-10.1/macppc/installation/ofwboot.xcf

copy it to this 512 MB HFS+ partition which you called boot .

==Boot the NetBSD installer CD

Boot into Open Firmware by pressing CMD+OPTION+O+F at power-on

boot cd:,ofwboot.xcf netbsd

Using netbsd.macppc like suggested in the INSTALL manual didn't work me (OpenFirmware version 3)

press enter for Terminal type vt100

I then followed the creation of partitions here on the Tenfourfox blog loosely

And now for something completely different: NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini (and making the kernel power failure proof)

(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...

tenfourfox.blogspot.com

Chose the option in the installer to go to shell, and adapted the Tenfourfox instructions to my use-case

S for shell

Attention backspace does not work in case you make typo's , you have to use CTRL-H as backspace.

pdisk /dev/wd0

When it asks you for a command, type a capital letter P and press RETURN.
This will print out the current partition map, which in my case showed 4 partitions:

the Apple partition map itself
the HFS+ partition
and a tiny Apple_Boot partition

After that is the space for NetBSD.
This was partition number 4 in my case.


First we will formally create the swap. This is done with the capital letter C command.
Indicate the first block is 4p (i.e., starting at partition 4), for 4194304 blocks (2GB), type Apple_UNIX_SVR2 (don't forget the underscores!), and choose the slice for swap.

Next is the actual NetBSD root: capital letter C, then saying the first block was 5p (i.e., starting at partition 5, the unallocated section), soaking up the rest of the blocks (however many you see listed under Apple_Free), type Apple_UNIX_SVR2 (don't forget the underscores!), and choose the slice for root

Verify the partition map one more time with the capital letter P command, then write it out with lower-case w, answering y(es), and then quit with lower-case q.
At the shell prompt, return to the installer by typing exit (ENTER) exit , press enter for the vt100 and then press I for install.

'a installation messages in English' press ENTER or change if you need another language

'a Install NetBSD to hard disk' press ENTER

'Shall we continue ?' choose 'b Yes' press ENTER

available disks a is selected in my case wd0 60G(igabtyes) , pressed ENTER

and when asked, indicate you will "a Use existing partition sizes.

In the list that is presented you will see the root partition on the top, a: , choose it and
press ENTER and choose' i: mount point' and fill in /
Then choose X OK , and then X partitions ok option.

Shall we continue? choose b: yes ATTENTION THIS IS WHERE NETBSD starts to format your harddisk

I chose a custom install to trim down the number of packages but learned on my first install that you better let it install textproc/compiler tools etc if you want to use pkgsrc to compile packages from source .

I installed all the X-related stuff since this is your graphical server.

Otherwise all these tools will need to be installed afterwards or worse compiled from source.

Then you will have to configure your timezone, wired network setup, add a user , add that user to wheel !

I chose NTP, NTP update, no SSH, none of the cgd/RAID/stuff but chose the xdm graphical login.

Make sure you install pkgin , it is the apt/pkg_add/dnf/yum of NetBSD.

if it complains that ftp cannot connect to https, change it to http and it will work.

When done configuring you will return to the main installer menu where you can select reboot , hold down CMD+OPTION+O+F again when your machine boots to go into OpenFirmware.

(if you are too late you will get the flashing folder icon, just reboot and keep the above keys pressed)

boot device hd:,\ofwboot.xcf /netbsd-GENERIC.gz

This will now boot NetBSD but each time you reboot you will have to go into OpenFirmware again and
type this command again.

In case you want your settings to be permanent , as in autoboot to NetBSD at poweron, I used these

setenv auto-boot? true

setenv boot-device hd:,\ofwboot.xcf

setenv boot-file hd:,/netbsd-GENERIC.gz

reset-all

Wifi is yet not configured so make sure to have your wired Ethernet cable plugged in.

Et voila you are now booting into the xdm login screen after which you arrive in cwtm (window manager) and are greeted by an uxterm/xterm window.

check that your Wired Ethernet has an ip

ifconfig gem0 | grep 'inet '

and that DNS works

dig google.com

switch to root

su root

pkgin install sudo

visudo

Use the arrow keys to go towards the bottom to find the line

##Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command

go to the beginning of the line underneath which says # %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

delete the '# ' by pressing x twice

You should now have

##Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command
%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Press :w followed by :q

type exit (ENTER) exit (ENTER) , your terminal window will now close.

Click on the background in the NetBSD open a new Terminal by click on ... Terminal 🙂

Now you can install packages using sudo pkgin install or search for them with sudo pkgin search

To be continued ...

 

[Lastic]

so a bit more detail.

NetBSD boots in 45 up to 60 seconds, albeit my machine has a mSATA SSD installed so pretty quick to me.
As such the no suspend/hibernate/sleep not working , well I'll just power if off and power it on again when I need to use it . Not like we're going to be doing heavy 12 hour stuff on a battery that lasts 5 hours max.

==WIFI

bwi aka Airport Extreme 802.11g card in the iBook , i followed the manpage instructions downloaded the firmware from
dragonfly bsd , but when I try to use it my system becomes slow or hangs so I guess I got the particular Broadcom chip that doesn't work.

I opted for an Edimax USB 802.11n adapter aka urtwn0 which works but like OpenBSD works only at 802.11g .
In reality I get about 2 MB/s speeds which are more than fine for my purposes. ( Yes I am that patient )

You need to add your SSID and WPA key to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf as root so use sudo
which should already contain these lines

# allow frontend (e.g., wpa_cli) to be used by all users in 'wheel' group
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel

Add these lines

network={
ssid="YOUR_SSID"
psk="network password"
}

and then adapt your /etc/rc.conf

ifconfig_urtwn0="up"
dhcpd=YES
dhcpd_flags="-4qM urtwn0". ( I choose only IPv4 hence the 4 , since I don't have a use for IPv6 )
wpa_supplicant=YES

However if I use the USB Wifi adapter , my gem0 aka Wired Ethernet doesn't seem to work ?

further I added the following to my ~/.shrc for convenience

set -o promptcmds

export PS1='$(id -nu)@$(hostname -s):$PWD\$'

export PATH=$PATH:/home/lastic/.local/bin

export WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1

That last one makes the WebKitGTK browser stable and be more responsive

Installed thus badwolf and vimb and w3m-img from packages

sudo pkgin install <package_name>

Now glxinfo and fastfetch both state I got NO direct rendering , no acceleration and well the DRI renderer is
llvm-softpipe aka CPU rendering.

But using mplayer I'm still able to playback 480p only SDL applications like hatari are super slow.

have installed Mesa-Libs ( which is mesa-amber ) but I can't find any info and am a bit confused as to where what lives.

For the window manager cwtm , where does it get it's default values ?
For example by accident I discovered that Right-CMD+F11 is paste and Right-CMD+o = F12

Brightness and Volume keys work out of the box.

Upon boot , NetBSD seems to use 120 MB RAM which is good.

Browsing using Badwolf or VIMB is slow but given the 2.0 MB/s using the Wifi , it is still ok.
There is not a point where I'm no longer sure if the browser crashed or if it is still loading.
It loads but slow.

I chose to compile xterm from sources /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xterm to get a newer version that supports sixel.

More info can be found here

xterm not being recognised as sixel supported. · Issue #33 · hackerb9/lsix

Using xterm on NetBSD 9.0_STABLE. I've set .Xresources to read XTerm*decTerminalID: vt340 lsix was placed in /usr/bin as there is no /usr/local on this system. ImageMagick is also installed. xterm ...

github.com

To choose the default options you can use

make show-options

to alter the flavor/flags of your package build

yt-dlp from binary packages was too old to function so I broke python by installing pip for the python version that was installed.

python312 -m pip install yt-dlp[default]

And did the same thing for

python312 -m pip install yewtube

As such I can search youtube and mplayer gives me 480p video playback.

( I know Coreplayer 720p even 1080p playback on iBook G4's under OS X but well MESA aargh)

I am now exploring cfm a simple file manager.

You can use

envstat

to see your battery life

So far the experience has been good , coming from OpenBSD it is a bit more less strict and there are still some things I haven't found out.

@pipetogrep you have an idea for the following topics

where is the default .Xresources ?
where is .Xorg.conf if it exists ?
where does cwtm gets its default settings from ?
bringing up both wireless and wired seems to break DHCP for my wired interface.

And the general *NIX issue for all the Radeon iBooks , how do we get mesa-amber to be used and finally have Acceleration.
One advantage is that NetBSD provides the mesa-amber branch and you don't have to compile it from source ( yup I did on OpenBSD but then had no clue how to get mesa-amber to be active )