I have a Mac mini from 2005. It has 1GB of RAM, 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processor, ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card and 80.0GB of storage space.

This machine barely makes any noise, takes up a little space and can read/write disks like a champion, so I decided I'll wipe the Mac OS X installation and get some *nix running on it.

My goals are:

- run X + 2bwm
- setup Vim (this is mostly easy)
- setup texlive (it must be the 2014 release, so goodbye netbsd)
- setup a build environment for programming
- run a Webkit based lightweight browser (I must be able to use an older version of webkit, because the newer ones crash on ppcs)
- run mplayer (low priority)

I've installed Debian Jessie after a friend's recommendation, but it was not my cup of tea. I couldn't manage setting the correct depth settings for Xorg without getting a segfault and neither could I downgrade webkit.

Now I'm looking for a Linux/BSD distribution for PowerPC. Please help me out with this decision, as I'm very excited to set my little workstation up and nix more!

https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

found that but there is ppc iso for 10.0 while this ^ showing 8.x

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releas...AGES/10.0/

If you plan on using mplayer in order to listen to music, I'd suggest the "play" binary from sox. It does exactly the same, but is way lighter on resources !

(03-09-2014, 08:54 PM)pvtmert Wrote: https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

found that but there is ppc iso for 10.0 while this ^ showing 8.x

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releas...AGES/10.0/

Just checked freshports, it says that texlive 2014 is available and webkir is still at 1.8.3, so I might give it a try. Thanks

(04-09-2014, 04:08 AM)z3bra Wrote: If you plan on using mplayer in order to listen to music, I'd suggest the "play" binary from sox. It does exactly the same, but is way lighter on resources !

I might (maybe) play videos, but that is a very low priority for me atm :) thanks for the suggestion though

Heavily dissatisfied from FreeBSD/powerpc as there are no binary packages available anywhere. My machine is not suitable for compiling huge programs every single day.

Debian on PowerPC is great. 2bwm is likely the only thing you'll have to compile, and it won't take very long at all (ten minutes top)

Have fun with it! I loved my PPC, it was a pretty nice machine for when I was feeling adventurous.

(04-09-2014, 11:30 PM)dbcooper Wrote: Debian on PowerPC is great. 2bwm is likely the only thing you'll have to compile, and it won't take very long at all (ten minutes top)

Have fun with it! I loved my PPC, it was a pretty nice machine for when I was feeling adventurous.

Thanks! I think that I am going to settle on Debian Wheezy (stable). The packages I will use are very old, but I don't think that's going to be a problem, as I will install vanilla TeX Live from tug.org and compile Vim myself (takes 5 mins).

I hope I willl be able to solve the depth problem, though!

Writing to you from Debian Wheezy. Font rendering is shit, but everything works just fine. Solved the depth problem as well!