My latest project is to install BSD on an old Mac Mini G4 I pulled from the back of a closet.

First attempt was with NetBSD 9.0-macppc, but I found the instructions too confusing. I guess I'm not as hardcore as I used to be. ;-)

Second try was with FreeBSD 12.0 powerpc. That went well; the install program knew what to do with this hardware and it wasn't any more difficult than with an x86 or amd64 machine. Then ran portsnap to fetch and extract the ports tree. But when I tried to build the ksh93 port I discovered that 12.0 was already end-of-life'd and therefore the port system refused to build anything. Arghh, I wish they'd told me that sooner!

So back to the FreeBSD site and grab the ISO for 12.1 powerpc. So far so good. Installed, and currently building ksh93.

Does anyone else have experiences with BSD on this hardware they want to share?

Installing NetBSD is certainly an interesting task. It pays off too: Once it works, you don't want to replace it anymore because you don't want to ruin your hard work. Similar to what I had experienced with Gentoo ... :-)

Sadly, I never had a Mac G4, so I cannot contribute anything useful - at least this time.

I hit a snag building the dependencies for the ksh93 port on FreeBSD. The configure script for gmp-6.2.0 doesn't recognize the machine type 'powerpc7447-unknown". Many things have are going to have gmp as a dependency, so this kinda leaves me dead in the water.

Currently trying to build spectrwm and its dependencies, just to see if I hit a similar snag.

This is an old underpowered machine I wasn't using anyway, so if I can't bring it to a usable state it's no big deal. Not sure it's worth reporting the error to the maintainer of the gmp port.

Maybe I'll give OpenBSD-6.7-macppc a try next. ;-)

P.S.,
There's nothing like building a window manager and its dependencies from source on a slow machine -- even if the window manager is as simple as spectrwm -- to make you appreciate just how much software goes into a graphical environment.

P.P.S.
Well this is encouraging. The build of spectrwm and *all* of its dependencies succeeded. "All" included stuff like python3.7. The only thing I had to do was remove the -Werror switch from the $CFLAGS used to compile spectrwm itself. (The warning emitted by the compiler looked fairly benign.)

Also, I was able to build mksh instead of ksh93. Cool, now I can use my preferred shell. Tomorrow I'll get to work building st and some of my favorite utilities. As long as I avoid things that need gmp this machine might be usable after all. (If that's the only problem, I *will* submit that bug report.)

fwiw, gmp is pulled in by anything depending on glib -- including the desktop-file-utils port, which is used by every file manager I've looked at, including my favorite vifm. God, I hate that glib crap! Fortunately I know I can build vifm without the desktop file stuff (I build it from github sources on my Linux boxes), so I'll do that here instead of using the port.

gmp is also a direct dependency of the gcc9 port, so any port that's still requiring that instead of clang to build is going to fail.

(25-05-2020, 05:16 PM)ckester Wrote: Also, I was able to build mksh instead of ksh93. Cool, now I can use my preferred shell.

Now I’m curious: Do you really notice a big difference between those?

I forgotten what it was, but several years ago when I was deciding between them there was a feature I needed that was in ksh93 but not mksh. I haven't done the comparison since then and wouldn't be surprised if by now they're feature-by-feature identical.

So you actually prefer a shell with less features? ;-)

AT&T (or what is left from their AST team) has shifted towards ksh2020 now, so I can only assume that the mksh will try to follow up again... in one of my tests, the mksh failed to run a ksh93 script once, and I haven't touched it since then.

No, when I referred to my "favorite shell" I meant Korn shell in general, as opposed to bash, zsh, or whatever. Sorry if that was unclear. I haven't tried ksh2020 yet, currently prefer ksh93, but will use mksh in a pinch (like the one I'm in now).

Returning to the problem after a good night's sleep, those dependencies seem odd for many of the ports affected. Why should gcc, for example, depend on a lib that's usually built with it?!? Sounds circular.

I'm going to play around with the knobs and see if I can work around that. (I'd been using the out-of-the-box settings and accepting default options.)

That’s why GCC has a bootstrap script on some platforms. Weird GNU stuff though.

My bad, FreeBSD is still using gcc rather than clang on this platform.

After some email exchanges with the freebsd-ppc mailing list, I hit on the solution to the problem with the gmp port:

edit the port Makefile to add the following CONFIGURE_ARGS:

--enable-shared
--build=powerpc

This gets past the configuration failure and allows a successful build and install. So I'm off and running with the rest of my setup!

Don't know why this didn't work out of the box, but I've let the port maintainer know so he can followup.

It took 24 hours or more to build gcc9 and another hour or two to build glib, but I now have ksh93 and vifm on this machine. Yay!

Later today I'll verify that xorg and spectrwm are working as expected, and then get the shell and wm set up the the way I like.

Very well done!

How did this pan out? would love to see a screenshot. Sorry, I haven't got much useful to add regarding mac-ppc, just adding my thoughts.

(25-05-2020, 03:04 PM)jkl Wrote: Installing NetBSD is certainly an interesting task. It pays off too: Once it works, you don't want to replace it anymore because you don't want to ruin your hard work. Similar to what I had experienced with Gentoo ... :-)

This. But It's only an interesting task the first time. Once you know the procedure for that piece of hardware it a matter or just backing up your config files and following the same process. Try to install on different hardware however keeps things "interesting" :-)

NetBSD might be highly portable, but its only as portable as your knowledge of the system and hardware. It took me a solid 36 hours and 3 failed attempts to first install NetBSD on my ThinkPad. But if I needed to reinstall again I could do it in 1.

A screenshot wouldn't be very interesting, since spectrwm is a fairly basic, no-frills tiling window manager.

Suffice it to say that after making the mods described above I got everything up and running. But it's an underpowered machine even compared to my ancient desktop (and my even more ancient laptop) so I haven't actually been using it very much.

And as you suggested, getting a BSD onto it was itself the interesting task. Now that it's done, I've moved on to other things...

Hi there!

Sorry for waking a seemingly dead thread, but I just dug out an old G4 Mac Mini on which I seem to have installed FreeBSD 9 in 2012. It still boots and works fine but I did not setup xorg back then... so I'd like to do that now, but I am not sure if updating it to a more recent base system version first might be the most reasonable thing to do.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if anybody is still running FreeBSD on a G4?

Cheers
Sven

(25-05-2020, 12:42 PM)ckester Wrote: My latest project is to install BSD on an old Mac Mini G4 I pulled from the back of a closet.

First attempt was with NetBSD 9.0-macppc, but I found the instructions too confusing. I guess I'm not as hardcore as I used to be. ;-)

Second try was with FreeBSD 12.0 powerpc. That went well; the install program knew what to do with this hardware and it wasn't any more difficult than with an x86 or amd64 machine. Then ran portsnap to fetch and extract the ports tree. But when I tried to build the ksh93 port I discovered that 12.0 was already end-of-life'd and therefore the port system refused to build anything. Arghh, I wish they'd told me that sooner!

So back to the FreeBSD site and grab the ISO for 12.1 powerpc. So far so good. Installed, and currently building ksh93.

Does anyone else have experiences with BSD on this hardware they want to share?

I have one of these in my closet. It's been out of service for a few years, but I used to run OpenBSD on it.

(25-05-2020, 12:42 PM)ckester Wrote: First attempt was with NetBSD 9.0-macppc, but I found the instructions too confusing. I guess I'm not as hardcore as I used to be. ;-)

Same deal here. I couldn't get NetBSD 9 working on my PowerBook G4. I followed the instructions exactly but the installs were always unbootable. OpenBSD 6.9 was much easier to install and connects to Ethernet properly out of the box so I can pull down some useful software.

The BSDs definitely shine brightest when you run them on non-x86 platforms. Ports to outdated architectures work almost exactly the same as they do on modern x86-64 systems, and that's really impressive to me. I can see why the Unix cathedral still has a cult following even though the Linux bazaar is bigger than ever :^)