September 14, 2003
Old iron never dies... just run linux on it!
Heh, I'd had several old PowerMac machines with no useful purpose any longer. So on a lark I grabbed the latest Yellow Dog Linux ISO images, burned the three CDs and went to town.
The end result now has YDL-3.0 running on them. BogoMips reports a molasses-like rating of 166, but whaddya expect from a 250mHz PPC 603e?
The install was smooth (it's basically just RedHat 9) and it managed to figure out the hardware pretty well. I didn't delve into printing but I've heard good things about using cups.
What's even cooler is they really run rdesktop at a quite decent speed. So they can be used as remote terminals to Windows boxes (or regular X and VNC sessions).
They're noticeably slow at doing local tasks so don't expect amazing things here. Even with 128mb of RAM and a 4gb disc the performance of locally-run applications has a lot of delays. Using monochome instead of full-color (16 bit) might help as the video hardware is totally un-accelerated. But where's the fun in that?
Yes, you can get by if you're running simple stuff. If you've no other box then these would certainly work. If you're looking to get into server-oriented linux stuff like running a web, dns, mail or news server these boxes do fine. If you want to get into graphic user interface stuff you'll being trying your patience on these old boxes.
There doesn't seem to be anyone that's tried or gotten the video in/out cards working. Not a big surprise as A/V subsystems on Macs are all pretty different from one generation to the next. That and Apple's not known for being very forthcoming with hardware details.
There are options for ancient 68k-based Macs but I gave mine away ages ago. Hardware support for them was pretty sparse, not to mention being s-l-o-w as can be. STFW for details if you're into that (don't ask me).
So if you've got an old PowerPC-based Macintosh lying around and you want to experiment with linux then give YDL a try. Especially if you just want to have a spare box to run some lightweight server stuff for a home network.
