Installing OpenBSD on the Fastest iMac G3

this is a very special iMac G3 AT a blistering 700 MHz it's the fastest one they ever made but Apple stopped supporting this thing with software updates well before some of you were even born so you might be surprised to hear that the latest version of open BSD still supports this machine today so let's install the world's most compatible modern OS on this 20-year-old relic of early 2000s Computing so stay tuned [Music] Ted and if you enjoy dragging innocent old computers into the Modern Age I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel the original 233 MHz iMac G3 was a revolutionary machine in 1998 and it saw continual upgrades over the years culminating in 2001 with this thing the 700 MHz version this model only lasted a few months though until the iMac G4 was announced well I've been trying to find one of these somewhat rare top speec iMacs for a while now to abuse I mean to show some love to and we're going to Max this iMac out with a handbuilt ID SSD from dos dude 1 toss in the Max Ram and install the world's most compatible operating system open BSD so let's crack this thing open and get this rather unhappy 20-year-old hard drive out of here the Plastics on this thing are pretty fragile so we probably shouldn't use a bunch of power tools on it and since the Dos D drive here is meant for laptops we can use a laptop to desktop IDE adapter here and just cover over these contacts to prevent any shorting out and I'll just make sure we have the full 1 gig of RAM installed with 2 512 PC 133 modules and I will replace this old battery here since we are going to store some values in open firmware now installing open BSD on an old Mac like this actually could not be EAS easier we've done it before on this channel with older releases but I'm going to do a quick walkthrough of the entire process here now because I hope you might try this on your own vintage Max right after this word about today's sponsor Factor you know I spend so much time using computers wrong that I hardly have time to prepare delicious meals also I can't cook like at all you can choose from 35 Plus weekly meals that factor delivers fresh never Frozen right to your door from dietitian approved calorie smart meals with around 550 calories per serving to Gourmet plus meals with upscale premium ingredients like broccolini leaks and truffle butter and they're already in Just 2 minutes heat and enjoy and holy cow did I especially enjoy the cilantro jalapeno pork chop the pork was cooked perfectly tender and the fresh cilantro really came through I would 100% eat this again and October is the perfect time to start with limited time fall flavor meals like cranberry pecan chicken and apple Deon pork chops so head to factor75.com and use code action retro 50 to get 50% off your first Factor box again that's factor75.com and code action retro 50 now just wait until you see how easy this install is we don't even have to burn earn any CDs we can do this all from a USB stick and we can get the iso image right from an openbsd mirror on openbsd dorg just click on the latest release here and then the FTP page for mirrors I use the Australian mirror because why not it's the first on the list and if we go down to 7.4 and then down to Mac PPC all we need to download is install 74. ISO and just flash that sucker straight to a USB drive okay so I've run into some problems and instead of showing you all of the trial and error it took to figure this out I'm just going to tell you so in case you run into this issue you won't be hopefully banging your head against the wall so so kind of three things I discovered one the iMac G3 is super finicky and does not like this adapter it does like this adapter so I will link that down in the description two unfortunately I don't think this iMac likes the Dos dude Drive I don't know if it's because of the size of the drive this is a 256 gig model open BSD does see that it's 256 gigs but I'm getting all sorts of like block errors and stuff so yeah I'm going to go with another solution namely this tried and true adapter that has always worked like a charm for me and I have a 1020 GB Dogfish MSA SSD in here so MSA SSD into an adapter into another adapter and that seems to work just fine third issue booting off of USB can be a bit hit or miss on the iMac G3 it seems like open firmware only recognizes the bootable USB one out of every five boots so I have to reboot it a couple times and go back into open firmware each time and eventually it does work so I can definitely see a lot of people giving up after one or two tries but keep at it because it will eventually let you boot from USB all right USB drive is in start up the computer command option o hold those down right after the chime and that drops us into open firmware okay so I have my USB drive in the top Port that is USB port one so we're going to type here boot usb1 slisk colon comma FW boot slash 7.4 SL Mac PPC slbs D.D hey look at that we got first try like I said before you might have to reboot a couple of times before it actually lets you do it just keep at it oh yeah look at that lovely blue and white BSD startup text so we're going to blow through this installation real quick because it's super easy but I'll point out the things you have to do along the way so I for install iMac G3 available network devices we're doing gem zero I've plugged it into ethernet already so autocon all right we got the DNS name server from the router do some secure passwords here start sshd by default yes we're running x windows and I'm going to say yes start it by Zeno DM automatically set up a user yep now we're going to install this to the root dis of wd0 sd0 is the USB stick and then we're going to use the whole dis so w we'll use Auto layout so a and it will do its thing and then done all right so now it's going to ask to install the sets and we're going to choose dis which is the default here partition already mounted is no and we're going to be installing from sd0 which is the USB stick the path name to the set is correct and then everything is checked off here so we can hit enter for done it's going to warn us about the Sha 256 we'll just type yes and there we go we are installing open BSD I will jump cut to this install being completed all right rebooting and once again holding down command option o to get into open firmware and now we just have to tell open firmware to always boot from open BSD on the hard drive instead of looking for Mac OS so set en boot device HD colon comma FW boot SL BSD and then reset hyphen all oh yeah USB stick is out we are booting into glorious open BSD off of the SSD now one more quick step to get a working desktop and I'm going to do it the easy way by sshing into the iMac G3 and copy pasting from my modern computer but we need to add an xorg doc config with the proper values for the IMAX display and video card and fortunately other people have done this before and what I've done is kind of tweaked a version of this that I know works on these machines using the R1 28 uh video driver and I've popped it up onto frog find so I will link to this file down in the description in case you're installing openbsd on your own iMac G3 package add WG get let's get Nano to and all we need to do is stick that file Inc X11 we can W get this configuration file and uh reboot look there it is the fastest iMac G3 ever made with 1 gig of RAM 700 mahz running a modern up-to-date operating system let's see how well it does wow pretty quick into the desktop here so by default we are in the very minimalist fvwm which I do kind of like quite a lot it's very old school looking and very fast and functional but we're going to want to get some other applications on here like perhaps a uh web browser so we can do package add Dow oh yeah Dow is great this browser will run on just about anything and it can browse modern websites with modern https it can't do anything fancy like complicated JavaScript but look at this CSS rendering working on Hacker News for a totally usable experience that's pretty fast honestly but let's try something even cooler oh yeah check this this out I just installed window maker which gives us this next step open step style interface oh look how cool this is oh yeah it's like I'm really using open step and everything you need to install windowmaker is available right in the open BSD repositories already compiled for Mac PPC and yeah it is very smooth on this machine just check out that is smoother than running tiger on here I think and we have a bunch of themes that we can choose from this is the open step theme let's see step 2000 o very nice this is this is awesome ah window maker is so cool wow look at this the elite theme all right check it out I think I found my my perfect desktop setup with this cool open BSD background and the checkers window theme man it is smooth really smooth now I did download a couple things like VLC I'm really curious if that will even launch oh goodness well it tried yeah that got a segmentation fault I downloaded a game called abuse let's see if that works nope segmentation fault all right well I think there are a lot of things that I can install on here some of them I'll probably have to compile I really want to put classic Cube on here but yeah just for now web browser Dow is super fast and it's a modern operating system that I can SSH into other machines and VNC and do all sorts of modern system stuff all right so we successfully got open BSD running on this thing and it runs great on this 700 MHz fastest iMac G3 ever released but there's a lot more I want to do with this machine specifically I want to try to overclock it and see if we can make open BSD run even better because I have a very silly plan I want to stream from this thing to Twitch using ffmpeg and I know it's possible because we've sort of done that in the past with a slower iMac G3 at about one frame per second but I think we can stream this thing to Twitch with my face and actually do something with it but in any event if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more stuff like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Andre JW Nicholson 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Channel: Action Retro

Views: 107,398

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

Id: -7gSMEsF3Q0

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023