Operating Systems for PowerPC Macs

[JackAHyde]

I have a dual boot of Sorbet and MorphOS. Honestly, I checked out MorphOS on my G5 because I never once saw an Amiga or Amiga-like system growing up but became curious about them after I first learned about them in the late 2000s. The general UI and feel is unlike any other OS I've ever used.

 

[lockfr]

Is MCPF Compatible for PPC?

 

[mortlocli]

PowerPC Linux builds

Download PowerPC Linux builds for free. Repositories for providing PowerPC packages missing in distributions. This project is for providing updated binary packages for Linux on PowerPC where the distributions aren't helping. The currently active projects are: - Ubuntu 18.04 rebuilt for powerpc...

sourceforge.net

This project is for providing updated binary packages for Linux on PowerPC where the distributions aren't helping.

The currently active projects are:
- Ubuntu 18.04 rebuilt for powerpc (32-bit big endian with optional 64-bit kernel). This is a logical continuation of the Ubuntu powerpc port which was discontinued after version 16.04.
- Debian ppc64 stable kernel. This is the latest kernel from the stable distribution (currently bookworm) built for ppc64. For those that would prefer a stable kernel build when running Debian sid ppc64.
- Debian powerpc/ppc64 builds of zfs-linux. This enables using ZFS on your Debian sid powerpc/ppc64 setup. Mostly useful for 64-bit kernels, but could possibly be used for 32-bit kernels as well with some tweaks.

 

[im_to_hyper]

PowerPC Linux builds

Download PowerPC Linux builds for free. Repositories for providing PowerPC packages missing in distributions. This project is for providing updated binary packages for Linux on PowerPC where the distributions aren't helping. The currently active projects are: - Ubuntu 18.04 rebuilt for powerpc...

sourceforge.net

This project is for providing updated binary packages for Linux on PowerPC where the distributions aren't helping.

The currently active projects are:
- Ubuntu 18.04 rebuilt for powerpc (32-bit big endian with optional 64-bit kernel). This is a logical continuation of the Ubuntu powerpc port which was discontinued after version 16.04.
- Debian ppc64 stable kernel. This is the latest kernel from the stable distribution (currently bookworm) built for ppc64. For those that would prefer a stable kernel build when running Debian sid ppc64.
- Debian powerpc/ppc64 builds of zfs-linux. This enables using ZFS on your Debian sid powerpc/ppc64 setup. Mostly useful for 64-bit kernels, but could possibly be used for 32-bit kernels as well with some tweaks.

With Linux doing away with 32-bit x86 support soon, any news on PPC?

Is it time to look at NetBSD for elder Macs?

In any case, PPC Linux 32-bit is unscathed for now. The Debian community does amazing work and there is another alternative:

ArchPOWER - an unofficial port of Archlinux to OpenPOWER and PowerPC

From their site, It supports:

• powerpc64le (>=POWER8)
• powerpc (>=604)
• powerpc64 (>=POWER4+/G5 & PS3)
• espresso (WiiU SMP)

This also then acts as the base for Wii Linux….

Wii-Linux

Small project dedicated to getting modern Linux running on the Nintendo Wii and GameCube

wii-linux.org

 

[Forest Expertise]

With Linux doing away with 32-bit x86 support soon, any news on PPC?

Is it time to look at NetBSD for elder Macs?

In any case, PPC Linux 32-bit is unscathed for now. The Debian community does amazing work and there is another alternative:

ArchPOWER - an unofficial port of Archlinux to OpenPOWER and PowerPC

From their site, It supports:

• powerpc64le (>=POWER8)
• powerpc (>=604)
• powerpc64 (>=POWER4+/G5 & PS3)
• espresso (WiiU SMP)

This also then acts as the base for Wii Linux….

Wii-Linux

Small project dedicated to getting modern Linux running on the Nintendo Wii and GameCube

wii-linux.org

Based on this article, here are my thoughts: https://lwn.net/Articles/1035727/
G5s will have no issues until IBM gives up on bi-endian systems, only then will Big Endian support possibly be removed from the Linux kernel. 32 bit is in more danger, but the article outlines that there are no plans to remove it either. Essentially, the Linux kernel will probably be fine for PowerPC Mac's past 2038 (when MacOS may start freaking out if there isn't a fix).
The issue isn't that 32 bit x86 is getting dropped from the kernel (at least anytime soon), it is that Linux distros are dropping it. We currently have very few distros (Debian sid and derivatives like Linux Mint, ArchPower, Adelie, and Gentoo) supporting 32 bit ppc as it is, and here is where I think they are going:
Gentoo will likely drop us (32 bit ppc) first: https://ostechnix.com/gentoo-drops-...precates-sparc-s390-profiles/#google_vignette
The Debian ports group is community based and appears healthy. Likely to survive past 2038 to some extent, as the Debian team is pretty friendly to community supported ports. The issue is that things break and can take a while to get fixed. One I heard about on this forum was OpenGL support in KDE. These types of problems will get worse over time, possibly to the point where no GUI will be useable.
ArchPower has a small group of maintainers (maybe just one?) so I would ask the maintainer about its future. Given the prioritization of the Wii, I speculate that 32 bit support is a given while the project is active.
Adelie Linux prioritizes PowerPC, but that project is still in beta and I don't know if it will ever exit beta. I don't see them dropping PPC support as that is where a lot of their publicity comes from. They are even considering support for 68k, so it is clear they are committed to retro computing: https://blog.adelielinux.org/2024/12/24/2024-state-of-the-adelie-linux-distribution/ That being said, they lag behind other Linux distros mentioned, and even Macos PowerPC in some areas (like GCC support).
In short, I am unconvinced BSD is more future proof than Linux for 32 bit PPC. I believe FreeBSD is dropping 32 bit PPC. You are right that NetBSD is probably the best choice in the long run among BSDs, but the only one of the four Linux distros I looked at that it will likely outlast is Gentoo.
If you have a (New World) G3, your best options for future proofing are: Adelie, Debian Sid(/Linux Mint PPC), ArchPower, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo, Tiger, MacOS 9. Check back in twelve years and see how wrong I was.

 

[MacPro2006VBox]

With Linux doing away with 32-bit x86 support soon, any news on PPC?

Is it time to look at NetBSD for elder Macs?

In any case, PPC Linux 32-bit is unscathed for now. The Debian community does amazing work and there is another alternative:

ArchPOWER - an unofficial port of Archlinux to OpenPOWER and PowerPC

From their site, It supports:

• powerpc64le (>=POWER8)
• powerpc (>=604)
• powerpc64 (>=POWER4+/G5 & PS3)
• espresso (WiiU SMP)

This also then acts as the base for Wii Linux….

Wii-Linux

Small project dedicated to getting modern Linux running on the Nintendo Wii and GameCube

wii-linux.org

Adelie Linux is pretty solid.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Gentoo - as distcc target? Personally I don't ever want to try install it on Canister (G4 MDD, 2x1GHz CPUs).

 

[Smithwick’s]

What's the lay of the land on Linux for PPC64 these days? I have Debian on my G5, have thought of giving Adelie another shot, but wonder if something else could fill that hole? Unfortunately my big hurdle is nouveau.

 

[barracuda156]

What's the lay of the land on Linux for PPC64 these days? I have Debian on my G5, have thought of giving Adelie another shot, but wonder if something else could fill that hole? Unfortunately my big hurdle is nouveau.

Gentoo, I guess. Whenever one cannot use BSD, pick Gentoo 🙂

 

[Matias_]

ArchPOWER works great. It got Firefox 148 for PPC64 very recently, and OpenJDK8 with HotSpot JIT.

 

[enigmaxg2]

How it's the landscape for 32 bit PPC Macs in 2026?

A customer brought an iBook G4 to my shop looking to modernize it (that is, have a current Office suite, browser, video player, etc) so it's either old MacOS (not that useful nowadays I think) or Linux, I installed some distro with Mate DE back in 2015 on a PowerBook G4 and only had to fiddle around with modules for the sound... I thought things could only improve since then...I was W R O N G...

I tried Adelie Linux and even after making all sorts of sorcery to get it installed (download an older ISO, manually partititioning, etc) still got a mostly non-functional install. Task manager shows that I have EiB of RAM (lol!!) simply opening VLC crashes the computer, updating anything broke the install... I got tired of trying this distro quickly.

Then I jumped to Debian PPC Port. This one is what has fared better... asked me nicely to provide B43 firmware, installed XFCE fine (others like MATE fail), it got several software right: Libre Office 26.X (WOW!!), Latest point release of XFCE4 (WOW!) sadly no signs of a browser (neither SeaLion, Arctic Fox or Basilisk are in the repos)... but all joy lasted until the second system start (onwards) where USB device mount stopped working, window decoration disappear (xfwm4 crashes with something about LLVM relocation not implemented, I guess it's related to the GPU stack), dialogs got often off screen (probably because the lack of a window manager)...

And I just tried ArchPower (thankfully I got a RW CD ... and the drive still works and reads those) and, well, it's my first time installing PURE ARCH, it was a titanic task for me but after failing a couple times (because the suggested /boot/ partition IS TOO SMALL and installing grub fails at copying the unicode font, I had to go 32M), then the wiki doesn't explain how /mnt/ should be mounted (and installing the base will fail if you don't create an ext4 FS then mounting /dev/sda3 to /mnt/)

It also doesn't say what to do after, so I followed D3sox guide from configure-system onwards (cherry picking some steps according to this machine, of course)

I got Libre Office (albeit the slightly older 25.8 version), VLC and others... tried to install DeadBeef to play MP3s and isn't in the repos, XMMS2 seems to install but I can't find it anywhere, same with ArcticFox, it installs but is nowhere to be found in the menu, trying to run from the terminal gives a segfault. Tried other browsers like SeaLion and Basilisk (in extracted folder mode, since not in the repos) and they both complain about libffi.so.7 which I still haven't figured out.

But the worst comes with the graphics, the Radeon 9550 (RV350) doesn't have HW acceleration by default so it's slow as molasses, at boot the system complains about R300_cp.bin, so installing linux-firmware-radeon should solve it, right? NO, it apparently works, but trying to run glxgears makes the GPU to lock-up completely, sometimes it goes blackscreen just minutes after powered on. radeon.agpmode=-1 doesn't help.

MorphOS is out of the question (both for pricing reasons and lack of an office suite)

The next stop could be *BSD, but I know NOTHING about it, can I get similar software to Linux there?

The customer needs: a decent and recent office suite (Libre Office), a good video/DVD player (VLC), a good music player (DeadBeef or XMMS2), a good file manager (almost all DEs have good ones), a good partitioner (Gparted) and a good browser (I guess only Firefox forks are the only choices available) and obviously, working GPU acceleration (not for gaming for obvious reasons) but to have smooth UI and possibly good 360p YouTube experience.

I'm in the second week of this battle, any help will be appreciated.

 

[Matias_]

I personally believe ArchPOWER will be your best bet as far as PPC Linuxes go, but as an ArchPOWER user I am biased obviously. Congratulations on installing it, if you have never done it before I can imagine it's quite daunting.

(because the suggested /boot/ partition IS TOO SMALL and installing grub fails at copying the unicode font, I had to go 32M)

To be fair the wiki does say 32 MB is plenty, but yeah this is something that could perhaps be clarified more to emphasize that 32 MB is recommended.

then the wiki doesn't explain how /mnt/ should be mounted

This is because the ArchPOWER wiki only contains PowerPC specific steps. The regular Arch Linux installation guide covers everything else and it is encouraged to read it.

VLC and others... tried to install DeadBeef to play MP3s and isn't in the repos, XMMS2 seems to install but I can't find it anywhere

VLC on ArchPOWER is sadly broken I believe, at least I was never able to get it working. MPV or Mplayer is reccomended, the latter performs best on slow hardware. But neither of these are as user friendly as VLC and on an iBook G4 you're probably limited to 360p at best (and even that might be a stretch under Linux).

XMMS2 needs a frontend, you can try lxmusic from the repos perhaps. ArchPOWER also has the audacious and tde-amarok music players in the repos. Audacious in particular is great because it is compatible with old WinAmp skins, so you can make it look exactly the same

By the way it is very easy to compile software on Arch Linux, ditto for ArchPOWER. If a package that I need is missing, I just git clone the PKGBUILD from upstream Arch Linux and compile it with makepkg. But this is time consuming and tedious, especially on an iBook G4.

Tried other browsers like SeaLion and Basilisk

This is again not very obvious but on ArchPOWER we have the Phantom Satellite browser (phantomsatellite-gtk2 package). It is an otherwise identical fork of Pale Moon (UXP), but with different branding to allow redistribution. It works well and I can recommend it.

SeaLion and Basilisk are the same thing (UXP based), just with a different GUI (and seem to depend on the old libffi library which causes issues). ArticFox is outdated and broken.

the Radeon 9550 (RV350) doesn't have HW acceleration by default

Unfortunately the state of old ATI r300 GPUs on PPC Linux just is not great at the moment. It works on some machines and not on others for some reason and there are quite a few bugs (on my HiRes DLSD PowerBook G4 glxgears works fine, on others it seems to have problems).

A Mesa developer is working on improving it (the ArchPOWER maintainer donated a PowerBook G4 to him). So it might get better in the future but right now, yeah....

The customer needs: a decent and recent office suite (Libre Office), a good video/DVD player (VLC), a good music player (DeadBeef or XMMS2), a good file manager (almost all DEs have good ones), a good partitioner (Gparted) and a good browser (I guess only Firefox forks are the only choices available) and obviously, working GPU acceleration (not for gaming for obvious reasons) but to have smooth UI and possibly good 360p YouTube experience.

But after having written all of the above, I actually think Mac OS X might be a good choice for your customer as well (I don't know how tech savy he is). Linux on PowerPC hardware is an excercise of patience. Reading through documentation, scouring old mailing lists, compiling your own packages etc.

Graphics and video playback performance on OS X is far superior to Linux on these slower G4 machines and great advances in web browsers have been made recently.

On Mac OS X 10.5.8 we have:

• a decent and recent office suite (Libre Office)
  The last (unofficial) version of Libre Office for PPC OS X is from 2016 and handles my modern Microsoft Word documents from university decently. More info here: https://matejhorvat.si/en/mac/osxppcsw/index.htm
  AbiWord is also a decent option if you want something more lightweight than Libre Office. It is available on both OS X (for a recent version you need MacPorts & x11) as well as ArchPOWER.
• a good video/DVD player (VLC)
  The last official version of VLC for PPC OS X works decently but might struggle with newer files for codecs. For DVDs it's fine though (but even the built in Apple DVD player suffices for that). For more modern codecs Mplayer & MPV from MacPorts work, but you really cannot expect too much out of an old iBook. For h264 video CorePlayer Mobile for OS X is by far the best, but it can only do h264 and nothing else. On my 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 CorePlayer can properly play back 720p YouTube videos downloaded using yt-dlp.
• a good browser
  Here we have the great new PowerFox web browser. It is based on exactly the same UXP codebase as all the Linux browsers (Pale Moon, Basilisk, SeaLion, Phantom Sattelite, etc) but ported to Mac OS X. There is still no JavaScript JIT, so modern web pages with bloated JavaScript will be just as slow as with the aformenetioned browsers on Linux.
• a good music player, a good file manager, a good partitioner
  I think the built in options of Mac OS X will suffice here, but there are many options (especally with MacPorts).

So it depends really. I am not gonna say that an iBook G4 is unusable for modern tasks because I do not believe that is the case. But you have to set your expectations accordingly.

 

[Smithwick’s]

How it's the landscape for 32 bit PPC Macs in 2026?

A customer brought an iBook G4 to my shop looking to modernize it (that is, have a current Office suite, browser, video player, etc) so it's either old MacOS (not that useful nowadays I think) or Linux, I installed some distro with Mate DE back in 2015 on a PowerBook G4 and only had to fiddle around with modules for the sound... I thought things could only improve since then...I was W R O N G...

I tried Adelie Linux and even after making all sorts of sorcery to get it installed (download an older ISO, manually partititioning, etc) still got a mostly non-functional install. Task manager shows that I have EiB of RAM (lol!!) simply opening VLC crashes the computer, updating anything broke the install... I got tired of trying this distro quickly.

Then I jumped to Debian PPC Port. This one is what has fared better... asked me nicely to provide B43 firmware, installed XFCE fine (others like MATE fail), it got several software right: Libre Office 26.X (WOW!!), Latest point release of XFCE4 (WOW!) sadly no signs of a browser (neither SeaLion, Arctic Fox or Basilisk are in the repos)... but all joy lasted until the second system start (onwards) where USB device mount stopped working, window decoration disappear (xfwm4 crashes with something about LLVM relocation not implemented, I guess it's related to the GPU stack), dialogs got often off screen (probably because the lack of a window manager)...

And I just tried ArchPower (thankfully I got a RW CD ... and the drive still works and reads those) and, well, it's my first time installing PURE ARCH, it was a titanic task for me but after failing a couple times (because the suggested /boot/ partition IS TOO SMALL and installing grub fails at copying the unicode font, I had to go 32M), then the wiki doesn't explain how /mnt/ should be mounted (and installing the base will fail if you don't create an ext4 FS then mounting /dev/sda3 to /mnt/)

It also doesn't say what to do after, so I followed D3sox guide from configure-system onwards (cherry picking some steps according to this machine, of course)

I got Libre Office (albeit the slightly older 25.8 version), VLC and others... tried to install DeadBeef to play MP3s and isn't in the repos, XMMS2 seems to install but I can't find it anywhere, same with ArcticFox, it installs but is nowhere to be found in the menu, trying to run from the terminal gives a segfault. Tried other browsers like SeaLion and Basilisk (in extracted folder mode, since not in the repos) and they both complain about libffi.so.7 which I still haven't figured out.

But the worst comes with the graphics, the Radeon 9550 (RV350) doesn't have HW acceleration by default so it's slow as molasses, at boot the system complains about R300_cp.bin, so installing linux-firmware-radeon should solve it, right? NO, it apparently works, but trying to run glxgears makes the GPU to lock-up completely, sometimes it goes blackscreen just minutes after powered on. radeon.agpmode=-1 doesn't help.

MorphOS is out of the question (both for pricing reasons and lack of an office suite)

The next stop could be *BSD, but I know NOTHING about it, can I get similar software to Linux there?

The customer needs: a decent and recent office suite (Libre Office), a good video/DVD player (VLC), a good music player (DeadBeef or XMMS2), a good file manager (almost all DEs have good ones), a good partitioner (Gparted) and a good browser (I guess only Firefox forks are the only choices available) and obviously, working GPU acceleration (not for gaming for obvious reasons) but to have smooth UI and possibly good 360p YouTube experience.

I'm in the second week of this battle, any help will be appreciated.

If this customer is expecting a truly modern setup they will likely be disappointed. Best case for that would be sticking on Sorbet Leopard and installs of old MSOffice editions, VLC, etc.

If they are adventurous you might actually have better results with OpenBSD on this platform. Just be sure to set up a desktop environment beforehand (LXDE installs and works well) but I’m not sure how ATI is over NVIDIA on BSD. The browser situation is also difficult without going to Ports, and even then it’s a bit of a tinkering landscape. If the customer is OK with tinkering a learning this could be a viable option. Otherwise, I think Sorbet Leopard is the way to go.

 

[enigmaxg2]

I personally believe ArchPOWER will be your best bet as far as PPC Linuxes go, but as an ArchPOWER user I am biased obviously. Congratulations on installing it, if you have never done it before I can imagine it's quite daunting.

To be fair the wiki does say 32 MB is plenty, but yeah this is something that could perhaps be clarified more to emphasize that 32 MB is recommended.

This is because the ArchPOWER wiki only contains PowerPC specific steps. The regular Arch Linux installation guide covers everything else and it is encouraged to read it.

VLC on ArchPOWER is sadly broken I believe, at least I was never able to get it working. MPV or Mplayer is reccomended, the latter performs best on slow hardware. But neither of these are as user friendly as VLC and on an iBook G4 you're probably limited to 360p at best (and even that might be a stretch under Linux).

XMMS2 needs a frontend, you can try lxmusic from the repos perhaps. ArchPOWER also has the audacious and tde-amarok music players in the repos. Audacious in particular is great because it is compatible with old WinAmp skins, so you can make it look exactly the same

By the way it is very easy to compile software on Arch Linux, ditto for ArchPOWER. If a package that I need is missing, I just git clone the PKGBUILD from upstream Arch Linux and compile it with makepkg. But this is time consuming and tedious, especially on an iBook G4.

This is again not very obvious but on ArchPOWER we have the Phantom Satellite browser (phantomsatellite-gtk2 package). It is an otherwise identical fork of Pale Moon (UXP), but with different branding to allow redistribution. It works well and I can recommend it.

SeaLion and Basilisk are the same thing (UXP based), just with a different GUI (and seem to depend on the old libffi library which causes issues). ArticFox is outdated and broken.

Unfortunately the state of old ATI r300 GPUs on PPC Linux just is not great at the moment. It works on some machines and not on others for some reason and there are quite a few bugs (on my HiRes DLSD PowerBook G4 glxgears works fine, on others it seems to have problems).

A Mesa developer is working on improving it (the ArchPOWER maintainer donated a PowerBook G4 to him). So it might get better in the future but right now, yeah....

But after having written all of the above, I actually think Mac OS X might be a good choice for your customer as well (I don't know how tech savy he is). Linux on PowerPC hardware is an excercise of patience. Reading through documentation, scouring old mailing lists, compiling your own packages etc.

Graphics and video playback performance on OS X is far superior to Linux on these slower G4 machines and great advances in web browsers have been made recently.

On Mac OS X 10.5.8 we have:

• a decent and recent office suite (Libre Office)
  The last (unofficial) version of Libre Office for PPC OS X is from 2016 and handles my modern Microsoft Word documents from university decently. More info here: https://matejhorvat.si/en/mac/osxppcsw/index.htm
  AbiWord is also a decent option if you want something more lightweight than Libre Office. It is available on both OS X (for a recent version you need MacPorts & x11) as well as ArchPOWER.
• a good video/DVD player (VLC)
  The last official version of VLC for PPC OS X works decently but might struggle with newer files for codecs. For DVDs it's fine though (but even the built in Apple DVD player suffices for that). For more modern codecs Mplayer & MPV from MacPorts work, but you really cannot expect too much out of an old iBook. For h264 video CorePlayer Mobile for OS X is by far the best, but it can only do h264 and nothing else. On my 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 CorePlayer can properly play back 720p YouTube videos downloaded using yt-dlp.
• a good browser
  Here we have the great new PowerFox web browser. It is based on exactly the same UXP codebase as all the Linux browsers (Pale Moon, Basilisk, SeaLion, Phantom Sattelite, etc) but ported to Mac OS X. There is still no JavaScript JIT, so modern web pages with bloated JavaScript will be just as slow as with the aformenetioned browsers on Linux.
• a good music player, a good file manager, a good partitioner
  I think the built in options of Mac OS X will suffice here, but there are many options (especally with MacPorts).

So it depends really. I am not gonna say that an iBook G4 is unusable for modern tasks because I do not believe that is the case. But you have to set your expectations accordingly.

Thanks for your detailed answer!

I didn't knew about Phantom Satellite, I got it installed and works good, sadly no WebExtensions so no uBlock (and browsing without that is a PITA!, sites have abused so much of advertising that it kills usability and performance)

Sadly, the lack of HW accel kills much of what I can do with it.

With firmware installed (R300_cp.bin) it's a bit smoother but as I said, crashes almost instantly.

Without firmware no HW accel is attempted at all but performance is atrocious.

In both cases I can't get YouTube to work, I get some blueish hue in every video, and the ads or the actual content only play for a couple seconds before freezing and can't interact with the UI to lower the bitrate.

"Graphics and video playback performance on OS X is far superior to Linux on these slower G4 machines" So sad that almost 20 years after, no one has managed to reverse engineer the drivers or figure it out.

I'm happy with ARCHPower since it gives near cutting-edge software (to my surprise, Debian managed to pull the most up-to-date packages).

Sound worked fot a bit but it doesn't again, touchpad is acting up too, it gets stuck and when I try to move the pointer, it makes "gestures" but it could be a HW issue as well.

 

[enigmaxg2]

If this customer is expecting a truly modern setup they will likely be disappointed. Best case for that would be sticking on Sorbet Leopard and installs of old MSOffice editions, VLC, etc.

If they are adventurous you might actually have better results with OpenBSD on this platform. Just be sure to set up a desktop environment beforehand (LXDE installs and works well) but I’m not sure how ATI is over NVIDIA on BSD. The browser situation is also difficult without going to Ports, and even then it’s a bit of a tinkering landscape. If the customer is OK with tinkering a learning this could be a viable option. Otherwise, I think Sorbet Leopard is the way to go.

How it's openBSD at fulfilling the requirements? (browser, office suite, music player, video player, etc) I guess it's similar to Linux choices, but if HW accel works there and a browser like Phantom Satellite is also available for it, maybe I just could settle on this one and finish the job.

 

[Smithwick’s]

How it's openBSD at fulfilling the requirements? (browser, office suite, music player, video player, etc) I guess it's similar to Linux choices, but if HW accel works there and a browser like Phantom Satellite is also available for it, maybe I just could settle on this one and finish the job.

Unfortunately it would be a bit more tinkering. I think AbiWord is in the binary repository but any solid web browser would have to be built via ports. Best I could get was Luakit but it worked quite nicely, just took the better part of a day to build. Honestly, given what I’ve read I think Sorbet Leopard is your safer bet. Sounds like the customer isn’t exactly into tinkering? And BSD of any flavor is not exactly tinker-free in the slightest.

 

[Matias_]

sadly no WebExtensions so no uBlock (and browsing without that is a PITA!, sites have abused so much of advertising that it kills usability and performance)

uBlock origin legacy can be found on the Pale Moon addons page. Direct link: https://github.com/UCyborg/uBlock-f.../1.16.6.1/uBlock0_1.16.6.1.firefox-legacy.xpi

So sad that almost 20 years after, no one has managed to reverse engineer the drivers or figure it out.

The thing is, it has been figured out long ago. But due to a lack of bug reports and/or a large userbase a lot has regressed in the Linux graphics stack over the years. It might get better in the future now that someone is working on it but sadly the current situation sucks. It also depends on the hardware for some reason. The last PowerBook G4, the DDR2 hires variant (which I have) works fine. But older ones freeze when running glxgears.

I'm happy with ARCHPower since it gives near cutting-edge software (to my surprise, Debian managed to pull the most up-to-date packages).

Glad to hear! ArchPOWER is a bit more curated to make sure everything works as well as it possibly could on this aging hardware, hence the packages are not as bleeding as you might expect from Arch. There is the [testing] repository which more or less provides that role but I'm happy with [base]. Debian Unstable is, well, unstable. So it has the most bleeding edge software but is also often broken.

By the way, this reply was written and posted from my PowerBook G4 🙂

 

[enigmaxg2]

It's so nice that you got it to work perfectly. I couldn't, it's either no HW accel and be slow as molasses, or have it then a complete system crash after 10 mins. That and quirky sound and wifi (still haven't found how to add the b43 blobs to it).

I will look for a Leopard or Tiger DVD since I need to install one of those to make the Sorbet Leopard install thing and call it a day.

Has been a nice ride but I cannot stand the customer anymore... he's calling every morning, afternoon, evening and night.. everyday. Asking if the modernization is complete. It's getting out of my nerves.

I also found a list of PPC-supporting OSes at oscomp and I found chimera as supporting!! then...

Plans to possibly retire the big-endian PowerPC/POWER platforms​

We brought up the platform support to give people interested in the platform a base to bring the platform towards greater usability and fix the long-standing bugs that plague it. This has not happened, and so far things have been getting very slowly worse instead.

Occasionally users come in looking to test it and often expect a fully working platform but generally quickly lose interest when faced with various issues and in the end nothing gets fixed.

For instance, it has not been possible to run a working GPU either platform for several years, due to unfixed regressions in Mesa, requiring use of the old Amber branch to get these working (which most people opt for and which also ends up counter-productive for fixing things upstream).

Likewise, there has not been an up to date web browser, and things are looking to regress further e.g. with WebKit having adopted Skia for rendering (WebKit was the sole web engine left where rendering didn’t have broken colors).

We don’t have a dedicated maintainer for the platform and so far I (q66) have been working on keeping things at least building but I don’t have the resources or motivation or real interest in keeping this going.

This pretty much sums everything wrong with this platform.

My bad when I thought it was going to be easier since the old times when I installed Ubuntu Mate on a PowerBook G4 (was 2015)

Maybe if people joins forces something can be done (like... don't have 10 distros fighting for a tiny niche...)

I hope someday things improve, and revisit this. For now I will take a rest from mailing lists, compiling things and staying up to 4 am trying and retrying distros on this thing.

 

[Nightphase]

I don't what to try on a recently bought iBook G3 Dual USB with a 40GB HDD and 192MB of RAM.
Does anyone know what runs best on this hardware? (I'm thinking of running something with WindowMaker + Dillo)

 

[tornado99]

I have an iMac G3 with the ATI Rage 128 (8MB?). To get 3D acceleration I would need Mesa 7.11, which would mean installing a 2012 era Linux distro and just keeping that frozen in time. To get 2D acceleration e.g. moving windows around the desktop I could use Modern Linux but would need Kernel 6.1-LTS (support expiring Dec 2027).

One topic which hasn't been mentioned is that Apple used Quartz Extreme back in the early 2000s to accelerate the desktop so that windows were doubled buffered and smooth. So my question for @Matias_ is does ArchPOWER include a lightweight X11 compositor such as https://github.com/tycho-kirchner/fastcompmgr that could run on an ATI Rage?

Edit: after some research Apple only used Quartz 2D on the iMac G3, which was entirely software based. It is possible that a rage 128 with EXA 2D acceleration of non-buffered windows of something like iceWM might be faster than Tiger, but adding a compositor like fastcompmgr to draw window shadows/translucency might not. Interested to know anyone's experience of this?

 

[Matias_]

So my question for @Matias_ is does ArchPOWER include a lightweight X11 compositor such as https://github.com/tycho-kirchner/fastcompmgr that could run on an ATI Rage?

ArchPOWER does not package fastcompmg (might ask if it can be included). But since there is an AUR package, compiling and installing it yourself is trivial.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/fastcompmgr.git
cd fastcompmgr
makepkg -Asi

I just tried it on my PowerBook G4 and it compiled without any problems. Runs great.

Oh and by the way: Rene Rebe from T2 SDE has added back XAA to Xorg. ArchPOWER now has XAA enabled Xorg in the [testing] repository. You might want to try it out. I don't own any Rage 128 hardware so I can't help you out, but there are people in the Discord server that do and I'm sure they would love to help you out with Rage 128 & iMac G3 adventures.

 

[barracuda156]

ArchPOWER does not package fastcompmg (might ask if it can be included). But since there is an AUR package, compiling and installing it yourself is trivial.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/fastcompmgr.git
cd fastcompmgr
makepkg -Asi

I just tried it on my PowerBook G4 and it compiled without any problems. Runs great.

Probably a redundant question, but on macOS it is broken, right?

 

[Matias_]

Probably a redundant question, but on macOS it is broken, right?

I don't know enough about the inner workings of XQuartz but it indeed does not appear to work. I compiled it and trying to run results in the error "No composite extension". I don't know if xorg-server legacy will let me enable compositing, I could not find anything conclusive.

 

[Steve Adams]

I have a quicksilver hanging around, how snappy would that be using linux on it? I love the look of the system. But if it's not going to be decent to run linux on I will not bother.

 

[Smithwick’s]

I have a quicksilver hanging around, how snappy would that be using linux on it? I love the look of the system. But if it's not going to be decent to run linux on I will not bother.

I think it would depend on the model, the quicksilver teeters just on the edge of what I find acceptable for OS X tbh (I'd classify them more as ideal MacOS 9 machines). If you're rocking a near 1GHz (867MHz model or better), or even any of the Dual Processor models, you may have some luck with something light - maybe Debian with a simple window manager like FVWM (maybe try out the MintPPC goodies and see if it's not too heavy) or ArchPOWER similarly configured if you feel like going all-in. I don't think Adelie would be a good direction.

You may actually have better luck with OpenBSD (or NetBSD). I've found the BSDs to fare a lot better on the modest hardware of G3s and early G4s, but getting them smoothly set up can be a bit more intensive when it comes to drivers/firmware, acceleration, etc. Check out the relevant threads here to see if the quicksilver has been discussed.