My "test machine" and newest project...

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When I get back home this Friday, I'm planning on digging out my family's, old, fruity iMac G3 (Blueberry? come on, Apple). It's got a 133MHz ppc processor. I'm not sure how much RAM it has right now- it started out with 32MB, but was upgraded at some point to accommodate early versions of OS X. My guess is 128MB, but it might be just 64, which would complicate things.

Now, my plan: I'm going to download some of the early PPC binaries for Darwin from Apple. Pure open-source BSD-flavored goodness. A bit barebones, but it sounds like a lot of fun. Once I manage to epicly fail at that, I'm going to install Debian and actually get a functional system out of it. After using that for a while, if I ever become more proficient in Linux, I might want to try out Slackintosh- the port of Slackware to PPC.

Why dont you give linux from scratch a try? There used to be a debian from scratch, but no longer.

Because that is way, way beyond my current competence level. I'll do Slackintosh well before I touch LFS. Gentoo also supports PPC if I'm feeling masochistic. And of course, I will probably at some point try the classic Yellow Dog Linux.

By the way, anyone have recommendations for a good, lightweight WM? Obviously KDE and GNOME are not options here, and XFCE would probably be too heavy as well. I was thinking IceWM, since I prefer it over Fluxbox (having to right-click to get a menu? lame) and I'm not sure what else is out there in terms of minimalist GUIs.

XFCE builds the desktop with tiled png, jpg and svg images. What you could do is build a custom lightweight set for a truly unique look, using your laptop. import that and try it with the test machine. gif images might work too. The arrangement of graphical items is stored in xml files, so you can hand edit those.

What you would want to do is a minimal xfce install though, rather than having it add all the services that come with the regular full install. Start with a cli install and add the GUI to that. You'll basically have the repository application, networking, drivers for mouse and keyboard. add in the desktop stuff for minimal xfce, and once that is going, you can carefully add stuff like office suites, a browser, et al.

I built a Xubuntu install that way and it fit in 750 megs on a thumb drive. I even had firefox and gimp. At the time i wasn't aware that deb installers were stored or I could have eliminated those too.

I'll probably end up going IceWM on my Debian install (easy, functional) and download some themes to make it an XP look-alike. That way, I'll have a Mac that looks like it's running Windows but is actually running Linux.

No, make it look like mac!

Well, I'll make it look like Mac (but optimized to be waaay faster than bloaty OSX) in order to convince my older sister to let me put Linux on her aging iBook. She's still on version 10.3, and the only modern OS that will run on her machine is Linux.

For what it's worth, I've been dusting off my old Compaq, and getting it to work on my LAN.

It has Puppy Linux on it, which uses Joe's Window Manager:
http://www.joewing.net/programs/jwm

The whole install takes about 240MiB at present.

It's running quite happily on 96MiB RAM (plus ditto for a swap partition) on a 267HHz processor.

One trick they use is to opt for SeaMonkey, so as to get browser, email and the rest in a single program. Also uses BusyBox.

I can't say I've played about with it extensively.

Looking down its start menu.... it seems to have an awful lot of stuff I hadn't noticed, such as Abiword, Gnumeric, DidiWiki(?) and Pidgin.

oh i read that wrong Orwell. 133 mhz processor? Yeah, xfce is to heavy for that.

I am guessing that this is the first iMac? It has a 233 Mhz processor not 133 Mhz. I installed OS X Panther on it at one point and it's really slow (even with enough RAM) I wouldn't recommend it. Additionally you wouldn't have enough hard drive space left to install any additional Software (they came with a 4 GB HD) and switching the HD with a new one is a really annoying procedure with the first iMac.

What do you think about making it a GNUstep workstation? It should be powerful enough.

Not the first iMac, though we have one of those in the basement as well (ah, the old "Bondi" iMac, that was a nice machine). My dad may have misquoted the processor speed when he described it to me, or just have been thinking of an older Mac we had in the distant past. Wikipedia tells me that the machine I am thinking of actually had either a 350 or 400MHz processor, originally 64-128MB of RAM (though it is possible that that was upgraded at some point, it might be 256). The smallest HD offered on that model was 6GB, which should be plenty, so I won't worry about hard drive space just yet. There's also a later iMac (a "graphite," not sure which revision it was) that used to belong to my sister and probably has better specs. Of course, it also has some drool running down the monitor from her diseased cat that took naps on it. Both of these have wireless cards (from before Apple bought crap from Broadcom) so that's how I'll get internet access on it. I might try to set up some wiring to get Ethernet, but the way the router is set up has been changed since we actually plugged our computers in like that.

Fuzzy: It's not necessarily about XFCE being too heavy to run on it; my goal is to get Linux running on this ancient hardware with comparable performance to OS X Leopard on my current rig. It will be a good demonstration of the power of Linux to show the rest of my family that I'm not completely wasting my time.

Lau: I'll look into that WM you mentioned. Puppy isn't an option because I'm not using Intel, though. I think I'll take your advice and use Seamonkey, even though I'm not really a huge fan of that browser. I'll probably get Dillo as well just to really make things run fast.

I can tell you one thing then (so you won't waste your time like me trying to make it work): if you use some encryption other than WEP you won't be able to use these cards under Linux (Airport cards only have hardware support for WEP and the Linux drivers don't provide software support for WPA. The OS X ones will however.)

Anyway, good luck with your project and have fun!

I've gotten Linux working with my home's wifi before. I'm pretty sure it's WEP.

thx. that might explain why my aircard doesn't work when I try using ubuntu..

I just wanted to add that if you have an Airport Extreme card (i.e. if your card supports 802.11g) you have to extract and install the firmware from the OS X or Windows drivers, it will then work without a problem with Linux.

All right, the test machine is excavated and is more powerful than I thought. 400MHz processor, 320MB of RAM (come on! where's the challenge in that?) I'm still going to go with a lightweight WM over XFCE even though this box could run XFCE, because I'm trying to convince my sister that Linux is the way to extend the life of her laptop. I may have gotten a bite today- when she saw me dragging this thing out of the basement, she asked if Linux let it run modern programs like Firefox 3. Score 1 for Linux.

In other news, it still has 10.3.9 running on it, is painfully slow with that, and is not able, in OSX, to connect to the house wifi. This is a problem. I may have to bite the bullet and set up Ethernet to avoid those issues- because without wifi problems, Linux is simply a dream to install and run.