[aklug] Fun with PowerPC

[Mike]

It runs reasonably well with Xubuntu.

Things seem slow to start up, but that might be because the hdparms  
are set to spin the drive down or something too quickly.

Here are the things that don't work at this point:

  - iSight Camera
  - Sound
  - Youtube
  - Can't run skype (no version for ppc)
  - Can't use virtualbox ( no version for ppc, qemu is suggested but  
will probably be slow)
  - Fan runs at pretty high speed all the time

Things that do work:
  - Wifi
  - Ethernet
  - browser (Firefox)

Still need to try:
  - Install Libre Office
  - printer (don't have a working one at the moment)
  - more effort into the things that don't work in the above list


I have found a file that should work for the firmware, but the  
isight-firmware-tools isn't available for the version of Ubuntu I'm  
running (16.04)

I haven't looked for source yet, so don't know if I could build that  
package for myself.

Am I missing something?

It might make for a good kiosk machine.

Maybe I'll use it to control my CNC machine...hmmm.


Quoting Royce Williams <royce at tycho.org>:

> Mike -
>
> Thanks for the writeup - fun! I get a kick out of new OSes on old hardware.
>
> Send a photo of it running Xubuntu (or maybe Lubuntu, for the smaller
> footprint?)
>
> And let us know about how it performs!
>
> Royce
>
> On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 6:53 PM, Mike <alaskabarsalou at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My father recently wanted to get rid of his old iMac G5 PPC.
>>
>> His first concern was erasing the harddrive so that none of his data was
>> on it.
>>
>> After poking around some, it turns out, from what I could find, that there
>> isn't really a good way to wipe a MAC OS drive without having some other
>> drive to boot.
>>
>> Since it was a working machine, I used the Internet to download a small
>> ISO image onto a 2GB USB drive.
>>
>> Three key things were:
>>
>>  - ensure that the USB gets formatted with HFS (use diskutil)
>>  - restore the iso image onto the newly created Volume (not the usb drive
>> itself)
>>  - after rebooting the machine, use Cmd-Option-O-F to get into openfirmware
>>
>> After getting into the firmware, you just issue this command:
>>
>> boot ud:,\\yaboot
>>
>> If you did everything right, it should boot into a shell which will allow
>> you to install a Linux OS (Ubuntu for me) or go to a command line and wipe
>> the drive.
>>
>> I used this command:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX
>>
>>
>> Where X is a, b or whatever letter your drive shows up as.
>>
>> It was a 250GB drive and took quite a while (more than 4 hours).
>>
>> I'm now installing Xubuntu on it.
>>
>> I like to revive old hardware...even got a laugh about using the old G5
>> box that it came in, until they realized it really was that computer!
>>
>> It makes me wonder if I'm the only one putting Linux on old G5's....
>>
>> Mike B.
>>
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