I miss the time when websites were mostly just text and images with minimal fancy crap. I remember how internet became more and more bloated back in early to mid 2010s. I was using iPad 2 at the time, and I started to notice websites working slower and slower. A lot of older machines could easily get on the internet if it wasn't bloated as shit with unnecessary fancy crap that oftentimes makes things harder to navigate and, naturally, slows shit down, takes more space, and consumes more system resources. Just because we have more resources available for us to use, doesn't mean we should entirely forget efficiency and the golden rule of "don't overcomplicate things".
I mean youtube was using 240p FLV back then with awful compression so it didn't look that good. Not even on a period correct monitor. Now x265 and av1 can make a video look amazing while only taking up a few megs instead of the 100-200 megs an flv did. Having a streaming box in every room no longer requires business class internet like it did in 2008 because everything is super compressed now. I'd even argue a simple 6meg connection is good enough
They never ran it particularly well tbh. Especially with web browsers, either no one cared to optimize for PPC, or PPC as an architecture just isn't optimized for such tasks like streaming & decoding video.
I ve been using Debian unstable for years. Had a problem just one time, don't remember which. Now I use Mint (not LMDE version, Ubuntu depots) , because it's easy, and it just works.
Yes, Debian does run on pretty much anything. I got a bunch of simulated QEMU machines that run Debian on i386, amd64, arm64, riscv64, hppa32, mipsel, loongarch64, ppc64, ppc64el, m68k, sparc64, alpha, s390x, sh4. And not even all the supported platforms are mentionned here!
@@OhhCrapGuy The nice thing with QEMU is that you can pass the kernel, initrd and arguments directly to the simulator, meaning you don't need a working bootloader in order to have a working simulated machine. But every time the kernel and/or initrd is updated, they must be extracted from the disk image to present to QEMU directly.
Get a Linux Based Car Entertainment System from Ali-Express, They are available $150-S400, the Replacement unit for older BMW's has a 8 Core CPU !!!...
I've found that in a lot of cases, the mobile versions of websites use a lot more CPU and RAM than the desktop versions, yet have a lot less features and usability.
@@WIImotionmasher I've found the mobile versions use tons of data. To the order of around 60-100MB for ads and another 25-50MB for the actual content. Load the same page in desktop version, and combined total data usage is around 40 MB For both ads and content.
Well thats just normal. Web programs tend to run on higher level programming languages that are not as effective as the lower level languages that desktop applications are made with
I was searching for a comment like this. Nothing shouts "outdated" or "it can run anything" than installing it on a 133 MHz 486. Though I guess that installing on things that are more obscure is even more ... uhm ... Linuxiest :)
Love Debian, reliable and no surprises. Along with NetBSD it's my favourite operating system for repurposing and saving old machines that would otherwise be destined for the e-waste scrap heap
I had NetBSD running great on some computers no version of Linux accepted to run. For example a Sun Sparc Station IPC or a dual Pentium 75 (non MMX of course).
Debian is crazy, but also Gentoo works on many architectures. And due to the nature of it compiling everything for that respective architecture, software is usually a little less prone to crash than precompiled binaries on Debian
Those graphical glitches on the G5 are likely the result of the nVidia GPU. nVidia doesn't open source their drivers so support can be dropped and drivers broken on newer kernels. As a result, likely your only option for a driver for that chip is going to be Nouveau, which is reverse-engineered and "useable" on those older chips at least. You'd be far better off with an ATI/AMD card on that machine.
surprisingly the old school radeons have been getting a ton of driver updates lately too lol, makes me think there's some guy ride-or-dying his HD 2900 XT.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 AMD open sourcing their drivers certainly helps matters with this sort of thing. They're gradually open sourcing their entire GPU software stack too now.
You should try using the H264ify plugin for Arctic Fox. It forces UA-cam to use the H.264 version of videos, which is less demanding to decode than the VP9 codec that UA-cam uses by default. Since the iMac G4 has no hardware acceleration for modern codecs, the CPU will need all the help it can get.
I really hope your videos reach people who can repurpose these machines and keep them from being e-waste. I know most of us here are techies and we do it for the love of building computers. but any chance I get I try to help people repurpose old (usually windows) machines and get extra life out of them. Last year I put ubuntu on a friends 2015-era laptop that was so slow (with windows) as to be un-usable. It had a mechanical HDD, and I'm fairly certain it was a SMR technology where writes are ridiculously slow. I put linux on there and it made the machine usable again. The browser is still incredibly slow to load, but once it loads she can access email, watch youtube and netflix, and use the word processor. The only gotcha was having to enable DRM for firefox so netflix worked, and that was a 3 minute google. She was going through a difficult personal and financial time, so helping her this way had a direct impact on her recovery. It's just a small example of how we can use our skills to help people and reduce waste.
I'd honestly throw in a cheap SSD when doing something like that, even on Linux it does a world of a difference in loading times and responsiveness, especially when the kernel starts swapping to the HDD because of little RAM
The better thing to do would be to just throw a cheap SSD in there. 2015 is ridiculously new for a PC imo. My Core2Duo machine from 2008 runs windows 11 just fine and all I had to do was throw in an SSD and some cheap $10 ram from eBay. No reason to be using HDD’s anymore.
@@slaapliedje but at the same time that iso was hidden and had big UNOFFICIAL in the name so might as well call it useless for anyone that does not know better, me included when i was a noob
@alexstone691 we were all noobs at some point. Ha, I started when I had a 19.2kb/s modem and it took 3 days from a netinstall version of Debian to get a full desktop...
I can attest the title is accurate. I've installed Debian on an SGI O² and a D-Link NAS. (I didn't come up with how, just followed some fairly obscure instructions. Those who wrote them were the real heroes.)
PS, both of those may or may not be harder in modern Debian. This was years ago. The 10 000 RPM HD in the O² was way too loud for my tastes. The NAS was not worthwhile anymore, with lackluster performance, but I might resurrect it as a secondary Amanda backup storage. I've moved on to SBCs which, in Debian terms, are perhaps weeping edge. (Not quite bleeding edge, as there is mainline support, just a bit harder than your average netinst.)
About fifteen years ago, I tried to repurpose a "Tangerine" iMac (G3) with Debian. It booted and was usable, but the lack of Flash was kind of a dealbreaker at the time.
Yeah, I did the same thing but with Ubuntu. I was disappointed to discover that, while Flash existed for Linux, it wouldn't run on PPC. Naive me thought that precompiled Linux software would run across all architectures.
Yep. I needed a laptop for school and the only thing relatively modern at hand was a 2019-ish Chromebook. Installed Gallium OS only to find it was unsupported and was weird when it came to the campus network and school sites. Tried SEVERAL Linux distros and almost all of them had issues regarding HW support or bloat. Then I tried basic bitch Debian. Worked FLAWLESSLY with far less bloat. There's a reason Debian's a go-to distro.
weird I had every distro work on mine and on a 14 year old machine. In fact my old machine works flawlessly on debian, mint, arch, fedora, and a couple others I tried.
Man, you can tell things are dire when there's only really two mirrors left for PPC 64-bit Debian. I wonder how much longer the kernel's going to officially support PPC.
Given that IBM's still making and periodically updating their POWER line, I doubt that kernel support for the newer little-endian stuff is going away soon. Big-endian support could be a different story though.
A UA-camr reported a month ago that Debian was dropping 32-bit support for the x86 platform soon. Linux dropped support for the Motorola 68000 at version 2.2 We can only grieve and look to the future.
Debian is not dropping 32-bit x86. It is nonsense. It will happen, but many years from now. Also Linux still supports m68k in latest kernel. No changes here. In fact it still see updates , especially recently.
@@movax20h The Motorola 68000 does not have an MMU and is therefore not supported by Linux. Perhaps, you mean one of the later revisions with an MMU like the 68020 or better.
@@mrquicky Motorola 68020 doesn't have mmu either. Nor it is required by Linux (Linux on m68k uses softmmu) . But it is true, that 68020 is minimum for Linux for some time. Very few computers run with MMU on 68020. There was external chip from Motorola, but few computer used it if any. There were also non-standard mums for m68k, in Sun workstations. I don't think Linux ever supported any of MMUs on m68k (even ones from Motorola).
a while ago, i installed Debian 11 on a 1999-ish fujitsu-siemens laptop that was thrown out at work. 6 whole GB's of spinning disk, a single 32-bit 500MHz Celeron core and a whopping 196MBs of RAM.. It didn't support USB boot, and the only other install media I had was a Debian 8 or 9 DVD, so i installed it and apt-upgrade'd my way to debian 11. It was painfully slow, but I got there, and i'm honestly surprised at how well it runs. As you said, a modern OS on a 20 year old machine! I didn't dare to run XFCE, but a minimal DWM setup ran pretty well. I even managed to load a plain HTML site in Firefox!
Using my G4 as a dukebox has been great, Itunes coverflow brings up fantastic album artwork. Setup the clear plastic harman/kardon speakers and away you go. The G4 is still usable today just got to use it now to it's limited but still usable state in 2024, thanks for another great video keep trying with the G5 and G4 love them both to bits.
Man, this is awesome to see! I love seeing Linux still supported on 32-bit PowerPC computers, even though they haven't been relevant in two decades or more. I bet any G3 or later computer could happily do email and word processing almost like an old 70s/80s terminal machine well into the future, for a little kid to use for schoolwork or something. Not everyone has the bucks for even a chromebook, times are tough these days and computers are a necessity now. Having updated software makes that idea much more secure and compatible (idk if I'd personally be comfortable with it having internet without a recent OS and kernel etc on it, for example) and you can really slim down a debian install too.
I think they’ve only been irrelevant the last 12 years or so. My school used them back in 2012 and they worked pretty good albeit showing age slightly. People waste wayy to much.
I run antiX, which branches off from Debian, and yeah, it runs on many, many things. I run it as my daily driver and on my crappy laptop, all works really well.
Great video. The amount of crapware we are running all the time is amazing. Adds, trackers, profilers etc. After so many years of optimization without the crap many sites should have shine.
I've been exclusively running various versions of Debian since 2004 when I got sick of MS Windows nightmares. Since all of my laptops are 8 - 20yrs old, I've used lightweight distros like Antix, AV Linux, Bodhi, Mepis, Makulu etc. All of them have been FANTASTIC and speed has never been an issue. If you've only got old gear, Debian and any XFCE Linux desktop (avoid KDE & Gnome) distro is the way to go 👍 PS : Lenovo laptops are the absolute BEST 👍😃
I'm very interested to see how well the G5 runs with a more stable GPU/driver. I feel like UA-cam should be usable with a 2.5GHz quad core system! And obviously Classicube should be pretty good if you can sort out the GPU issues.
I literally just did this with my powermac g5 from early 2005. I couldn't get Adelie working on it due to a bug in their installer. Even doing a manual partition, it wouldn't install. Slapped Debian on it and it worked. Crazy.
That's very neat! Now I'm curious where you got the Debian 12 installation image for 32-bit PPC_from_ . According to Debian's webpage on this port, it has been unsupported since Debian 8. So, did you start with that and dist-upgrade four times? If not, how _did_ you get Debian 12 onto this SSD of yours, and where did you get it _from_ ?
I just installed Debian 12 on an older PC for the first time yesterday! What a strange coincidence. I was confused that I had to install sudo manually. Maybe I unchecked something I shouldn't've? I plan on running it headless through CasaOS and so far (after the sudo side quest) have been having fun playing around in it.
sudo was probably installed (unless something realllly weird happened), but your user is not automatically added to the sudoers file (the one that gives users permission to use sudo)
I'm running debian stable on an upper midrange rig, and it's smooth like butter. I see no reason to ever switch DEs never mind distros! GNOME + Debian is just so excellent!
@@sobieckil07 But in terms of architecture, Slackware is closer to the original purpose of Linux; a free and open-source clone of Unix operating systems.
Had some issues installing on a Powerbook G4 - eventually I realised the fans weren't coming on, so I put a big desktop fan on it, and it worked. (Fan comes on fine with the completed install)
Please upgrade the graphics card on the G5 to the max. Find the absolute best card that can be made to work. Also, look into replacing the power supply with a modern power supply. Some people have done that.
all the repositories for all kernel modules are there, you can build your own kernel once you boot in with selected moduels for nearly any cpu architecture. you need to build software from source (make/install) and also required libaries.Thats how around year 2001 I could play a DVD on a cyrix 233Mhz with a GF4 64mb PCI card and 256 mb ram with no problems. people forget you can build several specific kernels leaving out unnessecery moduels for specific circumstances
I also ran this Linux on a G3 beige that has been upgraded to radeon, G4 533MHZ and SATA card and SSD. The configuration was LXDE desktop, and the NetSurf browser. I found ArcticFox too heavy, and Dillo too limited.
I feel that pain upgrading the G4 iMac, None of the iMacs were fun to open up and figure out When my youngest was a little kid I gave him a G3 iMac with OS9, and maxed the ram and larger hdd, he loved it and all the games he had for it, and you just couldn't kill that OS. My oldest son had the graphite G3 iMac which i upgraded the ram and harddrive and installed Mac 10.2 Jaguar on, he loved that too. I had the dark bluish gray g4 tower, upgraded ram and hdd with 10.2 They were all fun to use at the time and always reliable.
I have, not straight Debian, but Linux Mint Debian Edition 6, 32 bit, running on a Dell laptop from 2006. It works great. Saw everything including my wireless all-in-one printer and scanner and everything works perfectly. It has a Core Duo T2500 processor with 2GB of memory and an Nvidia Geforce Go 7800.
I need to pull out and try this on my G5 quad, dual core QS, G4 mini, iMac G4, DLSD and possibly a G3 Pismo. Not the entire lineup, just a couple of my favorites.
I've installed Gentoo on an iMac G5 17" and a PowerMac G5 DualCore 2.0. If you're upgrading a video card on your PowerMac, I've found the Radeon HD3xxx series to be very stable considering, though it does have a slight color issue.
To be fair the kernel he showed is 6.6 which is the last LTS kernel with 6.7.0-0 being the last I'm seeing on Manjaro Gnome, but yeah I wonder how long it will take Debian to move over to Wayland, what another 10 years? 😅
@@sugaryhull9688 But of course with Gnome as they are all in on Wayland, and it works really well(I'm using Manjaro Gnome on all my main PC's) but with all the other DE options, you gotta wonder how long will they take to update them to get full Wayland support, and if they will push it out the same time the DE devs do?
sigh - failed to install for me on both my iMac G4 and my iBook G4. Any idea why? They are in good working order with OSX... it fails without any specifics at the "software install" stage right before the grub install stage
Question, why not change the TIM while you're in there? These old PPC Mac use a phase change pad which "reflows" into a hard seal. With time it wears out and needs replacing. Great video though. I want to upgrade the G4 CPU on one of those iMacs to the fastest possible and see what happens.
Part of me wonders if using something like Gentoo Linux (where all the packages have to be manually built) would make a difference on these old and obscure architectures.
Oh my goodness I used to have that iMac back in the day!! It was a fantastic computer. This makes me wish I never got rid of it just to tinker with it now :’)
Idk about calling xfce a 2024 desktop but I sure would like to see you test UA-cam playback with smplayer or VLC. Smplayer has been my yt solution on low end devices for years. Happy hunting! 🐧
You need to do a vid on antiX. It's insane for old hardware. They ship a patched version of 32-bit Pale Moon without PAE which can run on PCs from the late 90s and use modern web apps like UA-cam.
Retry UA-cam playback with the H.264ify extension. I bet it's trying to load a VP9 or AV1 stream which is an automatic no-go on PPC. The Ubuntu on Intel Macs video you tried on the G4 loads an AV1 video stream for me, which again I highly doubt libdav1d is compiled for PPC.
I run G4’s up until about 2019. Couldn’t run UA-cam as far back as 2014 when I started with PowerPC such a shame I don’t know how to code I’d love to give it a go at making a new OS for these old machines to make them usable now
Oh man I haven't seen debian running on a G5 since probably 2012. I stopped using it when the nvidia driver got flaky and started doing strange things. If you throw an AMD card with a powerpc mac bios you will probably have a much better experience. Also powerpc is far from abandoned raptor computing systems has their power pc line of systems that are focused on Linux users.
Honest question, why does the Debian desktop environment have to be checked? I've always had luck not selecting it and just selecting one of the other desktop environments.
I see there's an "m68k" version of the debian 12 iso on the page you linked... is that for the Motorila 68k CPUs? Would that work on a 68040? Maybe an LC or a Perfoma?
i love debian - i've set up a terrible lenovo yoga as our family media-centre. debian is ideal because it won't do anything unexpected when my parents try to use it, but it's much faster than the oem windows 10 install. it just works! i'm thinking of using the 2008 imac in the attic instead, since it has a disc drive. needs further investigation.
Great stuff, and yes I think the GPU is the issue in the G5, if you have an AMD card that will work in the system you will get a much better experience as AMD is just better supported with Linux open source drivers compared to Nvidia.
Is that the big endian or little endian install for powerPC? I just looked at the repo and only saw the little endian (el) ppcel versions which i've always had more issues on PPC with.
What does glxinfo -B show in terms of graphics acceleration? Did you need to install more Mesa packages? It seemed laggier than it should… wondering if maybe the GPU is on Mesa-amber?
So did debian drop powerpc and then pick it back up? I have a mac mini in the closet i was using as a backup DVR for my security system, but it would no longer update because debian dropped that arch. The severely outdated software would continuously be tagged by the vulnerability scanner i was running, so i decided to stop using the mini altogether. I'll be seeing how well deb 12 runs on it now.
always wanted to revive / update (it actually still runs with solaris and serves websites) an old SunFire v880 server at work with debian 10, which still supported the very old UltraSparc III CPUs from 2000... never had time to actually do it though.
Dejavu! I was playing around with Debian 12 on my a1047 2ghz dual cpu PMG5 and ran into the same FF issue, settling on Dillo as well. I planned to install AF when I got some more free time. I used MATE though not XFCE. I like how XFCE is more responsive as MATE kinda chugs along and I don’t think I have video acceleration, so looking for a replacement gpu would probably help. Fun project for sure :)
It's crazy how both machines could run youtube beautifully at one point. The internet has become so bloated.
I miss the time when websites were mostly just text and images with minimal fancy crap. I remember how internet became more and more bloated back in early to mid 2010s. I was using iPad 2 at the time, and I started to notice websites working slower and slower.
A lot of older machines could easily get on the internet if it wasn't bloated as shit with unnecessary fancy crap that oftentimes makes things harder to navigate and, naturally, slows shit down, takes more space, and consumes more system resources.
Just because we have more resources available for us to use, doesn't mean we should entirely forget efficiency and the golden rule of "don't overcomplicate things".
thankfully things like invidious exists though i'm not sure how happy youtube would be if Sean shows the usage of that in a video.
I mean youtube was using 240p FLV back then with awful compression so it didn't look that good. Not even on a period correct monitor.
Now x265 and av1 can make a video look amazing while only taking up a few megs instead of the 100-200 megs an flv did.
Having a streaming box in every room no longer requires business class internet like it did in 2008 because everything is super compressed now. I'd even argue a simple 6meg connection is good enough
They never ran it particularly well tbh. Especially with web browsers, either no one cared to optimize for PPC, or PPC as an architecture just isn't optimized for such tasks like streaming & decoding video.
@@Biaanca5036 yeah, but those codecs need dedicated hardware or some ridiculously-powerful CPUs to decode in software.
"I'm going to install Debian Sid."
"It's not as stable as I would have expected."
Me: *Internal scream*
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
WHY IS DEBIAN SID UNSTABLE, UNSTABLE AHHHHHHHHHH
I thought that debian 12 would be stable by now
@@eth1111Sid is the permanent name for the testing and unstable channels. Debian 12 is bookworm.
@eth1111
Sid is the unstable rolling release. Its not a numbered version
I ve been using Debian unstable for years.
Had a problem just one time, don't remember which.
Now I use Mint (not LMDE version, Ubuntu depots) , because it's easy, and it just works.
"IDE native SSD" Is a phrase that brings me joy.
Yes, Debian does run on pretty much anything. I got a bunch of simulated QEMU machines that run Debian on i386, amd64, arm64, riscv64, hppa32, mipsel, loongarch64, ppc64, ppc64el, m68k, sparc64, alpha, s390x, sh4. And not even all the supported platforms are mentionned here!
Debian truly lives up to its name as "The Universal Operating System" with how it supports so many architectures, amazing stuff
Sparc32 & ppc32 😢😢😢
@@vvk858 Oh, forgot ppc32, also got that one working!
I tried Debian 8 on an HPPA machine at one point, booting was an issue, but Gentoo worked great. Don't have it anymore, or I'd try Debian 12.
@@OhhCrapGuy The nice thing with QEMU is that you can pass the kernel, initrd and arguments directly to the simulator, meaning you don't need a working bootloader in order to have a working simulated machine. But every time the kernel and/or initrd is updated, they must be extracted from the disk image to present to QEMU directly.
I want to see Debian running on that 1998 Jeep Cherokee.
Get a Linux Based Car Entertainment System from Ali-Express, They are available $150-S400, the Replacement unit for older BMW's has a 8 Core CPU !!!...
Technically if the infotainment system on it is new, yeah, that’d run Linux
my 2002 Grand Cherokee with the same engine ran Arch. unfortunately the transmission ran sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root
16:09 Small correction: The codename for Debian 12 is Bookworm, not Sid, Sid is the Unstable version
He ran Trixie which is the pre-release version for Debian 13, too!
I've found that in a lot of cases, the mobile versions of websites use a lot more CPU and RAM than the desktop versions, yet have a lot less features and usability.
I bet the mobile versions send stuff compressed, or get the front-end to generate elements more. To reduce data usage.
@@WIImotionmasher I've found the mobile versions use tons of data. To the order of around 60-100MB for ads and another 25-50MB for the actual content. Load the same page in desktop version, and combined total data usage is around 40 MB For both ads and content.
BuT iTs ThE wAy Of ThE fUtUrE 🤦♂️
reads article on phone (site sends requests for every single permission known to mankind)
Well thats just normal. Web programs tend to run on higher level programming languages that are not as effective as the lower level languages that desktop applications are made with
I would argue that Gentoo is the "Linuxiest" Linux, but Debian is absolutely respectable in that regard.
I was searching for a comment like this. Nothing shouts "outdated" or "it can run anything" than installing it on a 133 MHz 486. Though I guess that installing on things that are more obscure is even more ... uhm ... Linuxiest :)
@@Winnetou17I think BSD might be even Linuxier then.
It's definitely Slackware, you can't get linuxier than Slackware.
Going with Xfce? A man of refinement and culture, I see.
I might have to try XFCE more, I have used Mate on iMac G5, and LXDE on Beige G3 upgraded to G4.
@@danaeckel I like xfce at least on older machines. But I like KDE the most
XFCE my beloved. It's the only DE I can enjoy using.
Love Debian, reliable and no surprises. Along with NetBSD it's my favourite operating system for repurposing and saving old machines that would otherwise be destined for the e-waste scrap heap
I have NetBSD running on Quadra 800 and Dillo browser. Not fast at all, but functions.
I had NetBSD running great on some computers no version of Linux accepted to run.
For example a Sun Sparc Station IPC or a dual Pentium 75 (non MMX of course).
NetBSD is amazing
That G5 has more RAM than a brand new $1600 MacBook Pro!
Apple should be embarrassed
tbf the ram in that G5 is super slow
faster ram is cheap these days. So not really an excuse. @@axethepenguin
@@killingtimeitself yeah I’m aware but I’m pretty sure 1600MHz ram sticks won’t work in a G5
no, but apple definitely couldve have just put in more ram without taking all of your money.@@axethepenguin
Debian is crazy, but also Gentoo works on many architectures. And due to the nature of it compiling everything for that respective architecture, software is usually a little less prone to crash than precompiled binaries on Debian
Those graphical glitches on the G5 are likely the result of the nVidia GPU. nVidia doesn't open source their drivers so support can be dropped and drivers broken on newer kernels. As a result, likely your only option for a driver for that chip is going to be Nouveau, which is reverse-engineered and "useable" on those older chips at least.
You'd be far better off with an ATI/AMD card on that machine.
surprisingly the old school radeons have been getting a ton of driver updates lately too lol, makes me think there's some guy ride-or-dying his HD 2900 XT.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637I still have a nano in my linux rig. 😂
Definitely that. I was running a 6600LE (from a PowerMac!) on my Ubuntu-derived PC around 2015-2016 and it had glitches.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 AMD open sourcing their drivers certainly helps matters with this sort of thing. They're gradually open sourcing their entire GPU software stack too now.
i dont believe you, run it on a pregnancy test
Install a tarball using a pregmake command for pregancy tests and boot It using the grubaby
You'd have to find out how to get an image out, but the 4mhz CPU can def run Linux
If it can run doom Debian will run on it
Don't pee on the computer 😂
Somebody already made it I'm not joking he made it even to play Doom
Thanks to you I have a stack of old MacBooks running Linux…..for reasons
Heck yeah. Apple FOSS LAN party!
Bro gonna run a simulation of a working space if all coworkers ran linux
You should try using the H264ify plugin for Arctic Fox. It forces UA-cam to use the H.264 version of videos, which is less demanding to decode than the VP9 codec that UA-cam uses by default. Since the iMac G4 has no hardware acceleration for modern codecs, the CPU will need all the help it can get.
I really hope your videos reach people who can repurpose these machines and keep them from being e-waste. I know most of us here are techies and we do it for the love of building computers. but any chance I get I try to help people repurpose old (usually windows) machines and get extra life out of them.
Last year I put ubuntu on a friends 2015-era laptop that was so slow (with windows) as to be un-usable. It had a mechanical HDD, and I'm fairly certain it was a SMR technology where writes are ridiculously slow. I put linux on there and it made the machine usable again. The browser is still incredibly slow to load, but once it loads she can access email, watch youtube and netflix, and use the word processor. The only gotcha was having to enable DRM for firefox so netflix worked, and that was a 3 minute google. She was going through a difficult personal and financial time, so helping her this way had a direct impact on her recovery. It's just a small example of how we can use our skills to help people and reduce waste.
I'd honestly throw in a cheap SSD when doing something like that, even on Linux it does a world of a difference in loading times and responsiveness, especially when the kernel starts swapping to the HDD because of little RAM
The better thing to do would be to just throw a cheap SSD in there. 2015 is ridiculously new for a PC imo. My Core2Duo machine from 2008 runs windows 11 just fine and all I had to do was throw in an SSD and some cheap $10 ram from eBay. No reason to be using HDD’s anymore.
That’s so cool! Reuse and eliminate waste
The decision to include non-free firmware in Debian 12 was monumental. Thank you Debian team.
Wait are you being sarcastic?
Truly, before it was pain in the ass to install, and especially download considering the website was quite garbage
@@alexstone691it was only a pain in the ass if you had only wifi and non-intel. You could also just download the iso that had the firmware included.
@@slaapliedje but at the same time that iso was hidden and had big UNOFFICIAL in the name so might as well call it useless for anyone that does not know better, me included when i was a noob
@alexstone691 we were all noobs at some point. Ha, I started when I had a 19.2kb/s modem and it took 3 days from a netinstall version of Debian to get a full desktop...
Action Retro to his old Macs: Rise From Your Grave!
We can all thank Ian Murdock for making these otherwise obsolete 20+ year old PPC systems usable again.
I can attest the title is accurate. I've installed Debian on an SGI O² and a D-Link NAS.
(I didn't come up with how, just followed some fairly obscure instructions. Those who wrote them were the real heroes.)
PS, both of those may or may not be harder in modern Debian. This was years ago.
The 10 000 RPM HD in the O² was way too loud for my tastes. The NAS was not worthwhile anymore, with lackluster performance, but I might resurrect it as a secondary Amanda backup storage.
I've moved on to SBCs which, in Debian terms, are perhaps weeping edge.
(Not quite bleeding edge, as there is mainline support, just a bit harder than your average netinst.)
About fifteen years ago, I tried to repurpose a "Tangerine" iMac (G3) with Debian. It booted and was usable, but the lack of Flash was kind of a dealbreaker at the time.
Yeah, I did the same thing but with Ubuntu. I was disappointed to discover that, while Flash existed for Linux, it wouldn't run on PPC. Naive me thought that precompiled Linux software would run across all architectures.
@@3rdalbum There is/was "Gnash" as a multi-platform free Flash, but compatibility was weak.
Yep. I needed a laptop for school and the only thing relatively modern at hand was a 2019-ish Chromebook. Installed Gallium OS only to find it was unsupported and was weird when it came to the campus network and school sites. Tried SEVERAL Linux distros and almost all of them had issues regarding HW support or bloat. Then I tried basic bitch Debian. Worked FLAWLESSLY with far less bloat. There's a reason Debian's a go-to distro.
weird I had every distro work on mine and on a 14 year old machine. In fact my old machine works flawlessly on debian, mint, arch, fedora, and a couple others I tried.
Man, you can tell things are dire when there's only really two mirrors left for PPC 64-bit Debian. I wonder how much longer the kernel's going to officially support PPC.
Given that IBM's still making and periodically updating their POWER line, I doubt that kernel support for the newer little-endian stuff is going away soon. Big-endian support could be a different story though.
A UA-camr reported a month ago that Debian was dropping 32-bit support for the x86 platform soon. Linux dropped support for the Motorola 68000 at version 2.2 We can only grieve and look to the future.
Debian is not dropping 32-bit x86. It is nonsense. It will happen, but many years from now.
Also Linux still supports m68k in latest kernel. No changes here. In fact it still see updates , especially recently.
@@movax20h The Motorola 68000 does not have an MMU and is therefore not supported by Linux. Perhaps, you mean one of the later revisions with an MMU like the 68020 or better.
@@mrquicky Motorola 68020 doesn't have mmu either. Nor it is required by Linux (Linux on m68k uses softmmu) . But it is true, that 68020 is minimum for Linux for some time.
Very few computers run with MMU on 68020. There was external chip from Motorola, but few computer used it if any. There were also non-standard mums for m68k, in Sun workstations. I don't think Linux ever supported any of MMUs on m68k (even ones from Motorola).
Love the channel! Love finding ways to keep old hardware running and out of the landfill! Its a crime we waste as much as we do.
a while ago, i installed Debian 11 on a 1999-ish fujitsu-siemens laptop that was thrown out at work. 6 whole GB's of spinning disk, a single 32-bit 500MHz Celeron core and a whopping 196MBs of RAM.. It didn't support USB boot, and the only other install media I had was a Debian 8 or 9 DVD, so i installed it and apt-upgrade'd my way to debian 11. It was painfully slow, but I got there, and i'm honestly surprised at how well it runs. As you said, a modern OS on a 20 year old machine! I didn't dare to run XFCE, but a minimal DWM setup ran pretty well. I even managed to load a plain HTML site in Firefox!
"Even more wild that it just freakin' worked!"
Michael MJD senses a disturbance.
Using my G4 as a dukebox has been great, Itunes coverflow brings up fantastic album artwork. Setup the clear plastic harman/kardon speakers and away you go. The G4 is still usable today just got to use it now to it's limited but still usable state in 2024, thanks for another great video keep trying with the G5 and G4 love them both to bits.
Man, this is awesome to see! I love seeing Linux still supported on 32-bit PowerPC computers, even though they haven't been relevant in two decades or more. I bet any G3 or later computer could happily do email and word processing almost like an old 70s/80s terminal machine well into the future, for a little kid to use for schoolwork or something. Not everyone has the bucks for even a chromebook, times are tough these days and computers are a necessity now. Having updated software makes that idea much more secure and compatible (idk if I'd personally be comfortable with it having internet without a recent OS and kernel etc on it, for example) and you can really slim down a debian install too.
I think they’ve only been irrelevant the last 12 years or so. My school used them back in 2012 and they worked pretty good albeit showing age slightly. People waste wayy to much.
The thing is powerpc stuff is more for collectors now and will be sold at such prices just as old consoles are
I run antiX, which branches off from Debian, and yeah, it runs on many, many things. I run it as my daily driver and on my crappy laptop, all works really well.
I love how Debian not only supports PowerPC, but even still supports m68k! I wonder what the popularity contest results look like for the 68040!
So you're saying it might actually run on my IIsi?
@@diebesgrab I have NetBSD 9.3 running on a Quadra 800 and Dillo. SLOWWW but works.
68k runs on Amiga A2000 using a 128Meg 68060 Wildfire card, has since 1995 to my knowledge ...
Great video. The amount of crapware we are running all the time is amazing. Adds, trackers, profilers etc. After so many years of optimization without the crap many sites should have shine.
*Ads (short for ADvertisement, not ADDition)
I'm amazed at how well the G4 processor was designed, even when compared to its successor.
Especially when compared to its successor!
I've been exclusively running various versions of Debian since 2004 when I got sick of MS Windows nightmares.
Since all of my laptops are 8 - 20yrs old, I've used lightweight distros like Antix, AV Linux, Bodhi, Mepis, Makulu etc. All of them have been FANTASTIC and speed has never been an issue.
If you've only got old gear, Debian and any XFCE Linux desktop (avoid KDE & Gnome) distro is the way to go 👍
PS : Lenovo laptops are the absolute BEST 👍😃
Everything I got is core2duo era and below. I get by.
Looking to get a better laptop since I got a t410 with a bit of keys missing and no battery and a hard drive
I'm very interested to see how well the G5 runs with a more stable GPU/driver. I feel like UA-cam should be usable with a 2.5GHz quad core system! And obviously Classicube should be pretty good if you can sort out the GPU issues.
Nice! I will definitely try Debian 12 out on my iMac G4. Thanks for the inspiration 😊
I literally just did this with my powermac g5 from early 2005. I couldn't get Adelie working on it due to a bug in their installer. Even doing a manual partition, it wouldn't install. Slapped Debian on it and it worked. Crazy.
i love how much dosdude has done for the mac community. what a dude
I love your videos, main source entertainment at work
Nice! love seeing new life being breathed into old hardware.
the debian project is truly amazing
Watched your video with my 2011 Mac Mini running LMDE 6. So enjoyable! Aloha!
That's very neat! Now I'm curious where you got the Debian 12 installation image for 32-bit PPC_from_ . According to Debian's webpage on this port, it has been unsupported since Debian 8. So, did you start with that and dist-upgrade four times? If not, how _did_ you get Debian 12 onto this SSD of yours, and where did you get it _from_ ?
I just installed Debian 12 on an older PC for the first time yesterday! What a strange coincidence. I was confused that I had to install sudo manually. Maybe I unchecked something I shouldn't've? I plan on running it headless through CasaOS and so far (after the sudo side quest) have been having fun playing around in it.
When the debian installer asks for the root password just leave it blank. This will enable sudo automatically.
sudo was probably installed (unless something realllly weird happened), but your user is not automatically added to the sudoers file (the one that gives users permission to use sudo)
@@stephenhall1490 Can confirm.
Debian doesn't install sudo in default installation. It is Ubuntu thing to install it by default.
I'm running debian stable on an upper midrange rig, and it's smooth like butter. I see no reason to ever switch DEs never mind distros! GNOME + Debian is just so excellent!
debian is basically what linux is if linux was pure. Maybe gentoo but debian is the pipeline
linuxy linux... needs to be a distro
That’s called Slackware.
@@commentarysheep Considering how vocal and active Arch Linux community is, I think Arch managed to usurp the title of "the most Linuxy Linux"
@@commentarysheep Praise "Bob"!
@@sobieckil07 But in terms of architecture, Slackware is closer to the original purpose of Linux; a free and open-source clone of Unix operating systems.
This is therapy to me
Had some issues installing on a Powerbook G4 - eventually I realised the fans weren't coming on, so I put a big desktop fan on it, and it worked. (Fan comes on fine with the completed install)
Please upgrade the graphics card on the G5 to the max. Find the absolute best card that can be made to work. Also, look into replacing the power supply with a modern power supply. Some people have done that.
I would love to see more info on the psu upgrade that you mention
all the repositories for all kernel modules are there, you can build your own kernel once you boot in with selected moduels for nearly any cpu architecture. you need to build software from source (make/install) and also required libaries.Thats how around year 2001 I could play a DVD on a cyrix 233Mhz with a GF4 64mb PCI card and 256 mb ram with no problems. people forget you can build several specific kernels leaving out unnessecery moduels for specific circumstances
I also ran this Linux on a G3 beige that has been upgraded to radeon, G4 533MHZ and SATA card and SSD. The configuration was LXDE desktop, and the NetSurf browser. I found ArcticFox too heavy, and Dillo too limited.
Ahh the old G4 imac, with extra slice of bezel.
Great video. Your channel is so underrated
Thanks for the video. I have a G4 that needs this.
Most of us: "The 2004 Information Super Highway sure is fast." MySpace: "Hold my beer"
im trying this on my G4 and at 6:00 it fails. errors out every time i try to install a desktop enviorment. idk why...
I feel that pain upgrading the G4 iMac,
None of the iMacs were fun to open up and figure out
When my youngest was a little kid I gave him a G3 iMac with OS9, and maxed the ram and larger hdd, he loved it and all the games he had for it,
and you just couldn't kill that OS.
My oldest son had the graphite G3 iMac which i upgraded the ram and harddrive and installed Mac 10.2 Jaguar on, he loved that too.
I had the dark bluish gray g4 tower, upgraded ram and hdd with 10.2
They were all fun to use at the time and always reliable.
*BSD runs on more architectures though, like VAX, Alpha and SPARCs
I have, not straight Debian, but Linux Mint Debian Edition 6, 32 bit, running on a Dell laptop from 2006. It works great. Saw everything including my wireless all-in-one printer and scanner and everything works perfectly. It has a Core Duo T2500 processor with 2GB of memory and an Nvidia Geforce Go 7800.
Hey, @actionretro what is the SSD drive you installed onto the iMac?
I need to pull out and try this on my G5 quad, dual core QS, G4 mini, iMac G4, DLSD and possibly a G3 Pismo. Not the entire lineup, just a couple of my favorites.
I've installed Gentoo on an iMac G5 17" and a PowerMac G5 DualCore 2.0. If you're upgrading a video card on your PowerMac, I've found the Radeon HD3xxx series to be very stable considering, though it does have a slight color issue.
The only issue with running Debian on a 98 Cherokee is that you can't use Wayland and the kernel is not the latest.
To be fair the kernel he showed is 6.6 which is the last LTS kernel with 6.7.0-0 being the last I'm seeing on Manjaro Gnome, but yeah I wonder how long it will take Debian to move over to Wayland, what another 10 years? 😅
Wayland has been the default in GNOME since Debian 12
@@sugaryhull9688 the joke is about how Debian can run on a car.
@@MarcosCodasAh. Yeah. Wayland probably wouldn't run on a 98 Cherokee, but someone would sure try to get it to work lol
@@sugaryhull9688 But of course with Gnome as they are all in on Wayland, and it works really well(I'm using Manjaro Gnome on all my main PC's) but with all the other DE options, you gotta wonder how long will they take to update them to get full Wayland support, and if they will push it out the same time the DE devs do?
Debian is awesome, by far and away the best Linux distro that I’ve used.
Yesssss! Linux content from action retro is always gonna be a fun video
sigh - failed to install for me on both my iMac G4 and my iBook G4. Any idea why? They are in good working order with OSX... it fails without any specifics at the "software install" stage right before the grub install stage
Did you try fienix, as I thought it was optimized for PPC Mac and computers ?
I mean, this is wonderful.
XFCE has always been my go-to on any system.
Question, why not change the TIM while you're in there? These old PPC Mac use a phase change pad which "reflows" into a hard seal. With time it wears out and needs replacing.
Great video though. I want to upgrade the G4 CPU on one of those iMacs to the fastest possible and see what happens.
Part of me wonders if using something like Gentoo Linux (where all the packages have to be manually built) would make a difference on these old and obscure architectures.
This is truly amazing. Looks like my dual G5 gets another year running ;)
That Cherokee is beautiful and I love it! I miss my 94 Cherokee deeply.
Oh my goodness I used to have that iMac back in the day!! It was a fantastic computer. This makes me wish I never got rid of it just to tinker with it now :’)
The fun thing is that the Linux kernel can still be run on IBM system 390 hardware. It still has support.
Nothing fancy, I’ve installed it on g3 ibook and works great! Next, I eill try on my maxed out performa 5400
I just installed 12 on my 2.4ghz g5 power Mac the other night, and it installed flawlessly. It froze randomly tho, and I need to figure out why.
I had assumed the video glitches were my video card going bad.
So awesome! Does powerppc have zram-tools compiled...that will help on lower RAM machines
Idk about calling xfce a 2024 desktop but I sure would like to see you test UA-cam playback with smplayer or VLC. Smplayer has been my yt solution on low end devices for years. Happy hunting! 🐧
Good to know about smplayer. VLC hasn't worked for UA-cam for a while now. At least in my experience.
XFCE is actively developed so I don’t see why it wouldn’t count as a current desktop.
You need to do a vid on antiX. It's insane for old hardware. They ship a patched version of 32-bit Pale Moon without PAE which can run on PCs from the late 90s and use modern web apps like UA-cam.
WAIT NOW SO IT HAD FULL ACCELERATED HARDWARE SUPPORT WITH BOTH THE DDX AND THE MESA DRIVERS?!
Or do you have to compile Mesa for r300?
At 8:05 it says Debian Trixie/Sid. Why did you choose to go for the prerelease branch?
thats the only one available on powerpc
Retry UA-cam playback with the H.264ify extension. I bet it's trying to load a VP9 or AV1 stream which is an automatic no-go on PPC. The Ubuntu on Intel Macs video you tried on the G4 loads an AV1 video stream for me, which again I highly doubt libdav1d is compiled for PPC.
I run G4’s up until about 2019. Couldn’t run UA-cam as far back as 2014 when I started with PowerPC such a shame I don’t know how to code I’d love to give it a go at making a new OS for these old machines to make them usable now
Oh man I haven't seen debian running on a G5 since probably 2012. I stopped using it when the nvidia driver got flaky and started doing strange things. If you throw an AMD card with a powerpc mac bios you will probably have a much better experience.
Also powerpc is far from abandoned raptor computing systems has their power pc line of systems that are focused on Linux users.
Honest question, why does the Debian desktop environment have to be checked? I've always had luck not selecting it and just selecting one of the other desktop environments.
I can't believe we ran computers on spinning disks of rust and rarely ever anything went wrong with that. You expect the disks to constantly crash.
I wonder if Gimp and VLC works on PPC 😄
It is so much fun to install on PowerPC macs
I see there's an "m68k" version of the debian 12 iso on the page you linked... is that for the Motorila 68k CPUs? Would that work on a 68040? Maybe an LC or a Perfoma?
i love debian - i've set up a terrible lenovo yoga as our family media-centre. debian is ideal because it won't do anything unexpected when my parents try to use it, but it's much faster than the oem windows 10 install. it just works!
i'm thinking of using the 2008 imac in the attic instead, since it has a disc drive. needs further investigation.
Great stuff, and yes I think the GPU is the issue in the G5, if you have an AMD card that will work in the system you will get a much better experience as AMD is just better supported with Linux open source drivers compared to Nvidia.
These videos are so nice!
Is that the big endian or little endian install for powerPC? I just looked at the repo and only saw the little endian (el) ppcel versions which i've always had more issues on PPC with.
What does glxinfo -B show in terms of graphics acceleration? Did you need to install more Mesa packages? It seemed laggier than it should… wondering if maybe the GPU is on Mesa-amber?
2:39 Oh Yea! Peel that drive! Just like that....
So did debian drop powerpc and then pick it back up? I have a mac mini in the closet i was using as a backup DVR for my security system, but it would no longer update because debian dropped that arch. The severely outdated software would continuously be tagged by the vulnerability scanner i was running, so i decided to stop using the mini altogether. I'll be seeing how well deb 12 runs on it now.
always wanted to revive / update (it actually still runs with solaris and serves websites) an old SunFire v880 server at work with debian 10, which still supported the very old UltraSparc III CPUs from 2000... never had time to actually do it though.
PowerPC isn't really abandoned, IBM still makes it for their AIX systems
Dejavu! I was playing around with Debian 12 on my a1047 2ghz dual cpu PMG5 and ran into the same FF issue, settling on Dillo as well. I planned to install AF when I got some more free time. I used MATE though not XFCE. I like how XFCE is more responsive as MATE kinda chugs along and I don’t think I have video acceleration, so looking for a replacement gpu would probably help. Fun project for sure :)