Can an iMac G3 with OpenBSD be my daily driver?

well we're halfway through january which can only mean one thing it's time for a fashionably late entry into the mac yak power pc challenge where we try to do as much of our day-to-day computing as possible on old power pc machines and what better time to shove the latest version of openbsd 7.0 onto this 23 year old imac g3 let's find out if running a lightweight modern os on slightly outdated hardware can give us any semblance of a usable modern experience oh and it's a heck of a fight to get openbsd running correctly on this thing so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy unix flavored shenanigans on purpley max i hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel i have some really over the top shenanigans planned for a really really rare macintosh so it's definitely worth sticking around the powerpc challenge has been going on for a few years and it's a pretty fun time i'll link to the thread on tinker different down in the description last year i decided to tackle gaming we installed adelie linux on my powermax g5 and used it as a public minecraft server for the powerpc optimized version of minecraft now that's a pretty powerful machine almost modern with its dual 64-bit processors at least when running a modern 64-bit linux this year i want to tackle limitation which i think is the most interesting thing about this challenge specifically just how far can you push extremely limited hardware if you give it a fully modern operating system it's also a great excuse to pull out one of my favorite machines this grape imac and boy oh boy is it limited hardware it's a revision d tray loader from the second run of imax after the original 1998 bondi blue what it's bondi bon die right bruce sorry sorry i forgot it's named after a beach in australia bondi beach it has a 333 megahertz g3 processor and thanks to a broken ram slot it's limited to just 256 megs of memory to put that into perspective there's probably more ram inside your wi-fi router and a five dollar raspberry pi zero has double the amount of memory as this thing does not to mention the fact that it uses a 32-bit power pc architecture the vast majority of operating systems from mac os to most linux distros dropped support for it many many years ago on the linux side there is adelie void and a few older but still pretty modern versions of debian and ubuntu and then there's bsds many of which are surprisingly still fully supported for 32-bit mac powerpc today we're going to be looking at openbsd 7.0 mac ppc not only is it the latest release actually just about four months old as of this filming but it's also the easiest to install and get going on a power pc mac at least for the base system in fact i tried it on a whole bunch of my other power pc macs and i was stunned to see it detect all sorts of weird hardware options it even configured this sonnet wireless card right out of the box but although the base system is incredibly easy to install with the guided walkthrough which we'll see shortly getting to a graphical desktop was not so easy in fact i had to manually configure xorg mostly going off of 20 year old threads on various linux forums for clues and it was a tedious and frustrating experience it took me like nine hours of trial and error and honestly i almost gave up on it i finally got it working at about midnight last night now i was inspired by this blog post at a link below of someone with the same imac g3 grape tray loader who got openbsd working with graphics and they provided their xorg conf file but unfortunately it didn't work on my mac i think they actually included the wrong version because it gave me a garbled screen you know what isn't a tedious and frustrating experience though ordering custom pcbs from pcbway.com famous for their fast turnarounds as fast as 24 hours and great pricing pcb way now offers many types of pcbs including advanced pcbs with tighter tolerances flexible pcbs and lots of interesting solder mask colors and if you've got fat fingers like i do they even offer pcb assembly so you can save time on the soldering so check out the link below to start your pcbway.com quote and you'll really help the channel in the process so before we actually install openbsd on this thing i do want to upgrade it with a bit of a modern nicety we'll swap out that spinning hard drive with this nice sata ssd and ide sata adapter this will really help us out if we hit that 256 megabyte ram limit because we can have a fast swap partition to use as extra memory now cracking this thing open is kind of a huge pain so let's get to it now this thing is a hefty beast so we have to switch to patented slippers cam to take it apart it's been a while since i've taken this thing apart and the last time i did it was a real pain not as bad as i remember it actually so i just realized that this thing doesn't actually have a broken ram slot because the memory that's on top here is a 128 megabyte module which means that there's a second 120 meg module on here underneath for the 256 meg so technically i could increase this to probably 512. but i think in the spirit of this challenge i'm going to keep it at 256 megs of ram now this is the most annoying part it's like a puzzle to get it out of here because you have to slide back up and then forward on this stupid bracket just look at this yellow molex isn't that just the worst yellow you've ever seen in your life gross i guess i should probably keep the original drive bracket in there just so i don't lose it all right time to install openbsd on an ssd in an imac g3 that kind of sounds like a draga1 video and now we see that lovely white on blue highlighting text that is characteristic of open bsd's boot screen but we have our install upgrade auto install and shell so we hit i for install and this literally just walks us through the whole process just kind of hand-holding us so i guess bm0 is our ethernet we'll let it auto-configure and we're connected to the router pick some nice secure passwords start sshd yes i am going to run x windows i do want it to start automatically i'll set up a user nice secure password or allow root ssh login no eastern time zone and it sees our wd 0 hard drive so that's good we'll let it do mbr which is the default and it looks like i had adelie linux installed on this ssd before but we're just gonna write over that whole disk it automatically figures out a partition scheme we'll just go with that all right we want to install from the disk all right well now it doesn't see the cd-rom okay so i ran into some problems and i'm gonna cut a lot of it out because there was a lot of tedious trial and error but what it boiled down to was this imac g3 is extremely finicky when it comes to ssd adapters and in fact it didn't like this one and uh didn't like this one didn't like this one or uh any of these adapters in this ssd so i trial and error basically every possible combination of all of these adapters and ssds and i took adapters out of other computers to try them none of it worked so what i wound up doing was going with a cf card in a cf to ide adapter from startech.com with a 34 gigabyte cf card it's not the solution i wanted to do and uh i'm not sure if it's even that much faster than using the spinning disk hard drive but at least it's silent and it did finish the install and you probably also noticed that uh this cd-rom drive is not the original and that's because the original cd-rom in here failed in the middle of filming because of course it would so i really channeled my inner dragon one and i found this docking station for an ancient gateway pentium 3 laptop pulled the cd-rom drive out of here it's actually a cd-rw and that works in this thing just fine but all of this all of this is not the most annoying part no let me show you how i got a graphical desktop on here because that was the most annoying tedious part and uh it took me forever to figure out over nine hours of text-based trial and error and yeah hopefully what i've done to make this work can help you if you're trying to get xorg running on linux or bsd on one of your old macs with rage 128 graphics okay so in order to actually get a desktop we have to configure the xorg config and to do so we'll do su switch user go into roots and i'll show you what you can do to easily set it up cd etc x11 i wrote after much trial and error and xorg.conf that works and i've put it up for download so you have to add the wget application and then you can just download the one that i've pre-configured and it should work at least on your rage 128 equipped imac g3 so now you can do wget and it's on the frog fine server right now i might move it later if i do i'll put a redirect but i'll always put the updated link in the description of this video but if you do frogfind.com slash files slash bsd slash xorg.conf this will download the one that i've created and once you download it and then restart it'll boot right into the desktop but let me show you what that file is basically i had to trial and error through all of this configuration using things like forums from 20 years ago threads with people trying to figure this out xorg.coms that people posted for like ubuntu six point something and uh i finally got it to work and it's using unfortunately no acceleration in the fb dev driver instead of the actual ati driver because that just doesn't seem to work and when i try it with the ati driver i get a garbled screen so i'm using fb dev even though driver here says ati but if i reboot now we should boot up right into the graphical desktop and you know i'm still getting some timeout errors on the cf card so i'm wondering if even that isn't the best option for this super picky imac oh and i almost forgot the last thing we have to do is actually boot into open firmware command option o f and we have to tell it to boot into bsd which isn't very hard so bsd is on our hd which is the hard drive so we can do set n boot dash device hd colon comma ofw boot backslash bsd and then do reset hyphen all and now it'll boot into bsd every time all right so now we can finally log in with our secure login credentials and we'll be taken into the default open bsd desktop which is fvwm and it's a very minimal desktop environment but also extremely usable and i've made a few quality of life tweaks mainly around the colors here in x-term so we can see what we're doing and i've also installed a little bit of software such as neofetch which is obligatory of course which shows that we are indeed running at 333 megahertz on our power pc g3 750 very cool and we apparently are only using 83 megs of our 256 megs of ram for this full responsive desktop environment pretty cool now i like fvwm quite a lot it's kind of like if windows 3.1 was modern the entire background is actually the start menu here but i did install a couple things including some web browsers so first we have dillo which is an extremely basic web browser no javascript very lightweight but it does have modern ssl so we can go to modern websites so here's http google we do https and yeah we can get onto modern websites just fine let's try the orange site that people love to hate and actually let's pull up a program called h-top that i've installed so we can just keep an eye on our memory and uh processor usage yeah we're only using eight percent of our 333 megahertz processor right now smoothly browsing the internet look how nice and smooth this is maybe not perfectly rendered but hey it's okay hacker news render is all alright but let's try a little bit of a better web browser in my opinion and that's called netsurf and can i just say i am completely shocked by how smooth and fluid this desktop is look here's netsurf this is a comparatively very heavy application but yeah we're still doing pretty well not even using really half of our available 256 megs of ram we haven't even delved into the swap space yet and this browser does support javascript it's turned off by default but it is much more modern we have a much more modern looking google and yeah it's showing us the mobile site probably because our screen resolution and this window size is pretty small 1024 by 768 on this imac but yeah look how well this scrolls pop into hacker news here again the orange website that people love to hate and look at that rendered as if this was a modern pc and i saw an article on here a while ago there it is life at 800 megahertz let's pop into the comments here see how well that loads you know we do spike up to 100 processor usage but we're still only at 160 megs of memory all right so it took about 30 seconds to load into the comments here but look at that i mean it's not the smoothest scrolling experience that i get on my modern macbook pro but this is a totally totally usable experience i have to be logged in to vote evidently and i'm not going to do that yeah so let's take a look at this article i was reading this a little bit earlier and it was right up my alley life at 800 megahertz yeah so this person is blogging about using a sony vaio vgn p588e 800 megahertz 32-bit machine with linux as their daily driver i just thought it would be pretty funny to look this article up on hacker news on our 333 megahertz imac g3 running open bsd and uh yeah we're not i don't think we're going to get video working surprisingly well on this machine but for consuming web content and in the spirit of the power pc challenge this is a usable experience okay let's do something real heavy here let's go to reddit we'll do old.reddit.com and i don't know how this is going to go hey look at that less than 20 seconds to load into https old.reddit.com we've got no javascript enabled and it loads just fine anyway resize the window here let's let it recalculate the dom yeah that was super fast look at this scrolling through reddit just fine and oh man there's lots of politics on here so yeah great website experience but depressing content okay let's try a real cool website here tinkerdifferent.com yeah so loads again less than 30 seconds we did max out at 100 cpu seems to be almost done processing totally done 45 seconds to render the entire page granted again without javascript and this of course is the home of the power pc challenge and we can go into the thread itself okay so i really enjoy the fvwm window manager here but i recognize that not everyone likes such a minimalistic experience so i've actually already installed ice wm which is a much more modern but still extremely lightweight window manager so let me pull it up and show you just what kind of really modern good-looking experience you can get on this open bsd so this is ice wm in its default configuration and it might look a little simplistic but there's a lot of power and configuration hiding just beneath the surface the default ice wm is kind of configured to look like windows 95 honestly maybe a little hacker version with the little green clock over here but there are a ton of themes so if i open up a nice little x terminal here look how smooth this is i mean mac os 9 is about this smooth but this is a modern operating system and if we run h-top we're only using 125 megs of memory and 5 of the cpu well going up to a lot more if we start dragging the window around but say this early 90s motif is not your style well this comes with a ton of themes so we're on the default theme right now my favorite theme is nanoblue yeah check this out how cool does this look and again we're only using 128 megs of ram and this is a very slick looking modern operating system with four desktops that we can switch through we can pull up our applications through a normal kind of start menu here pop up our netsurf web browser and yeah this is a good looking theme and a very shockingly responsive desktop experience i mean this is really blowing my expectations completely out of the water this is so responsive so modern and uh honestly good looking i mean trying to run leopard on a one gigahertz mac is way slower than running this completely modern 2021 open bsd on this 333 megahertz g3 look at that look how smooth it is and it's formatted correctly i can't get over it honestly it's so good it's so good so what have we learned here today well two very important things one if you're ever tempted to try and put an ssd into one of these original imac g3s don't bother it's a huge headache and you're probably better off with the original spinning disc hard drive two and most importantly open bsd is amazing i mean if i can get this much performance and usability out of this limited hardware imagine what openvsd can do on something like a raspberry pi or a server or even your primary computer if it's a little bit old i mean i'm browsing the modern internet with modern ssl and this thing well it breaks a little bit of a sweat but it's perfectly perfectly usable if you're going to put like a minecraft server on your raspberry pi you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck using openbsd and it's stable and it's secure it's amazing so if you happen to see your local bsd developer please tell them thank you we appreciate your hard work on this incredible bit of software and we really appreciate that it's still available on our beloved power pc but that'll do it for today's video if you liked it i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to camilla nosada chris alegretta chris calderon chris nelson that's a lot of chris's david teglafix greg crockkay from rock k mods john malman nick hamsey who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 96,662

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: rT71HwfiM_A

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/gumnos]

In case anybody else tries this, you don't need to add wget since the ftp(1) utility in the base system also knows how to fetch over HTTP in addition to FTP. Otherwise, fun video. I've got OpenBSD 7.0 macppc running on a more modern iBook G4 and it's pretty silky smooth.

[u/[deleted]]

Hey I know that guy!

[u/7yearlurkernowposter]

That was fun, didn’t know openfirmware could handle a MBR drive but then again I also didn’t expect that mac to have openfirmware. Figured it would have been an old world still.

[u/Willing_Birthday_451]

Nice one. Fvwm rocks and so does OpenBSD.

[u/Paspie]

This looks quite a lot faster than my HP 2133 underclocked to 800MHz. NetSurf is basically unusable on that thing. I blame openchrome.

[u/w-a-t-t]

i have a 17" PB G4 that is/was a daily driver ... 2Gb RAM ... hangs during very hot days, no browsing, can compile the full kernel code. suckless all the way. the PCMCIA card is the most used device for this machine and only thing that bites me everytime! making media on these BE machines ... i just smack my head everytime for not remembering. fdisk/disklabels written on BE machines might not work properly on LE machine or vice versa.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=157679376401549&w=2

the 12" is similarly setup with suckless but much less memory. i didn't time the kernel compiles but 24H later it was still running. definitely, more portable than the 17".

[u/haakondahl]

THIS VIDEO inspired me to get off my butt and actually install OpenBSD. Been whinging about how I'm gonna do it for years now.

Coming to you live from OpenBSD and xfce in a Virtualbox (don't kill me) on Linux. Now I get to learn so I can try it on real hardware. I have a 2012 MBA and my beloved 2008 Unibody MBP 15. Keyboards can't be any worse than this chiclet-keyed hp laptop gaming rig (discount virtual multi-host). Projects...

But THANK YOU to the author of this video! I saw that grape Rev D and knew I was out of excuses.

[u/zarezarethinks]

This vid is how I found his channel. His vids are pretty entertaining