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The Proactive Service Manual and Experience Revitalizer
- Thread starter z970
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Good thread. I've been spending a lot of time with Windows XP lately, and still find it to be quite usable for when I want things to "just werk"or play video games. Still plenty of current web browsers to choose from, and even a current Chromium fork, that I'm fairly certain is a Chinese botnet (360 Secure Browser).
The storage card and new VPU came in recently, so I've had some time to try the final result...
This machine is an IBM IntelliStation M Pro 6889 currently running Debian 10.3, and has been decked out with the following:
2 x 600mhz Pentium !!! (Katmai) processors
1 GB PC-100 SDRAM
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX
Adaptec ATA-133 Card
Gigabit Ethernet Card
250gb 7200rpm IDE HDD
SuperDrive
I schitt you not, this thing drives like a dream on Firefox 68 ESR. As a result of foxPEP in combination with the VPU's 256-bit memory bus, page scrolling is mostly butter smooth. YouTube videos can be comfortably streamed at 360p without much hassle. Sites load fast, and applications are responsive.
A short time ago, I didn't think these things were possible on over 20-year-old hardware!
You learn something new every day.
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Perhaps... But then again, these are all still hypotheticals at that stage.
How much better? I was under the impression that the R300 was the best a 3.3v slot could pull.
This machine is an IBM IntelliStation M Pro 6889 currently running Debian 10.3, and has been decked out with the following:
2 x 600mhz Pentium !!! (Katmai) processors
1 GB PC-100 SDRAM
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX
Adaptec ATA-133 Card
Gigabit Ethernet Card
250gb 7200rpm IDE HDD
SuperDrive
I schitt you not, this thing drives like a dream on Firefox 68 ESR. As a result of foxPEP in combination with the VPU's 256-bit memory bus, page scrolling is mostly butter smooth. YouTube videos can be comfortably streamed at 360p without much hassle. Sites load fast, and applications are responsive.
A short time ago, I didn't think these things were possible on over 20-year-old hardware!
You learn something new every day.
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Perhaps... But then again, these are all still hypotheticals at that stage.
You can do better than a 9700 on AGP 2x
How much better? I was under the impression that the R300 was the best a 3.3v slot could pull.
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I have a Radeon 9800 Pro in a Sawtooth. This is a fully 2x AGP compatible card.
@Amethyst1 Yes. They're server-grade machines too, so they're robust as hell. And very loud.
It's a travesty the entire family is quite a lot rarer than your average G4. Not only does this fact severely knock down parts availability, but also any real chance of their own enthusiast community like this one. Pretty much the best they can get is a showing or two in places like VOGONS ...
It's a travesty the entire family is quite a lot rarer than your average G4. Not only does this fact severely knock down parts availability, but also any real chance of their own enthusiast community like this one. Pretty much the best they can get is a showing or two in places like VOGONS ...
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First thing I'd do is quieten it down as much as possible - another project to pursue.
LIVE SI ESION
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Stock.
I really need to get the computer out and do more with it. It has a Giga 7455 at I think 1.4ghz or so. It probably deserves a SATA card and SSD or at least a fast SATA drive.
I actually rather prefer it that way. For one reason or other, I've always liked big, hot-running, loud machines. Case in point, this one currently has four case fans, not counting the PSU. The only thing that I think would make it even better is if you switched it on by turning a key instead of pressing a button.
I'm considering mounting another fan, because the Gigabit, IDE, and VPU cards are getting too hot for comfort - and they've already been given additional heatsinks.
General reminder: If anyone else has non-PPC hardware to boast over, this would be a good, focused place to do it.
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Alright folks, post #1 is opened up.
If you've got info for making dated platforms faster at what they do, adding it in would be appreciated.
If you happen to have another name for the thread, that would also be appreciated too.
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@z970mp have you tried Sid on your Intellistation lately? On the i686 front, it's been broken for me for the past several months. Xorg is completely borked (in my personal experience. Font glitches, screen flashing, etc.. ) on R370 and older, as well as NV40 and older. Like I said, this problem has persisted for a few months now, and was still the case as of 04/30. I'm concerned about what the next stable release has in store for our old GPU's.
@sparty411 No, it's been mainly on either Debian 9 or 10. I have tried OpenBSD 6.6, but it just kernel panics due to the second processor. Maybe their multiprocessing kernel has deprecated support?
Anyway, Bullseye is still over a year away. I'm sure it will all get resolved before it goes into freeze. Worst case scenario, we just revert to the Buster graphics layers while waiting for Bookworm.
And if things don't work out, we can just switch to one of the thousands of other distros available to i686.
Anyway, Bullseye is still over a year away. I'm sure it will all get resolved before it goes into freeze. Worst case scenario, we just revert to the Buster graphics layers while waiting for Bookworm.
And if things don't work out, we can just switch to one of the thousands of other distros available to i686.
Haha, indeed. It makes me really sad that so many distro's seem to be in a race to see who can drop i686 the quickest. However, I am confident that SOMEONE will continue supporting i686 well into the future, considering how ubiquitous the hardware is.@sparty411
And if things don't work out, we can just switch to one of the thousands of other distros available to i686.
It will survive until well after the 2036 bug. If such a niche architecture like PowerPC can amass a community such as this one (in addition to the guys at Macintosh Garden and Mac OS 9 Lives), imagine what i686 can gather up when given the same conditions ...
The possibilities are downright scary indeed.
Now that I was able to boot into OpenBSD/XFCE I dare to ask, how to launch Window Maker from the command line.
Also don't know, if "pkg_add windowmaker" did install the right thing ...
Put the command to launch windowmaker in your ~/.xsession file, then run "doas rcctl -f start xenodm"
rcctl controls daemons, such as xenodm. Starting xenodm will start X11, and will execute the lines contained in ~/.xsession upon X11 startup.
Oh sorry causing you so much trouble ... I thought it was just a single command like "startxfce4" for the XFCE-desktop ...
This is something I have to dive in more deeply and I have to postpone further efforts to another weekend unfortunately.
BTW, is there an option for VPN(CiscoIPSec) and an RDP-client for OpenBSD, that might give me the option to run them on a PPC in any PPC-version of BSD?
It has an IPSec implementation built-in; look into ipsecctl and ikectl.
You can pkg_add rdesktop for an rdp client.
Well, that looks promising!
But based on my skills I'm gonna need ages to understand - it looks like a learning curve too steep for me.
I don't believe I'm gonne get the knack before retirement - and then I won't have any need for VPN/RDP anymore ...
There is a lot there, but this part of the FAQ may be useful: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq17.html
I know it won't help you here with IPSec, but if you need a client for Cisco AnyConnect VPNs, openconnect is available as a package (# pkg_add openconnect)
neat, I always wanted to use the NextStep look. On what OS can I use this? I don't think NextStep is available for download or can be installed on any modern hardware.