G4

by rihahn

Purely for the entertainment value, today I’m installing weird operating systems on my 17-inch 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4.

I briefly had MorphOS, the AmigaOS-alike offering, installed. I installed MorphOS via the last burnable DVD I had handy, so it was pretty easy to install; insert DVD, reboot, hold down alt, choose DVD, boot.

MorphOS looks nice, but doesn’t run well enough to warrant spending the money for a license.

Anyway, not having any more 5.25″ coasters handy everything else would need to be installed via USB – which on older hardware can require some deep magic… But fear not, I happen to have been there when the deep magic was created.

For example, you have to know that any USB stick you use has to be USB2. USB3 sticks simply won’t work. You also need to know your way around Open Firmware, which is the unix-esque boot environment on stranger hardware.

The next OS to be installed was Adélie Linux, which professes to be both PowerPC native and lightweight enough for a twenty year old machine.

To get Adélie Linux onto USB was a bit of an adventure in itself, mostly because my desktop is a bleeding edge Apple M1 running “Monterey”, the latest Apple OS… An OS where Apple seems to have decided no one needs to burn ISOs anymore.

So, after some experimentation here’s the method for booting a G4 off of an ISO burned to USB…

  1. Format the USB as FAT (not 32) with a GUID partition map.
  2. Get a copy of Balena Etcher and use it to spool the ISO to the USB stick.
  3. Stick the USB into the G4 (USB port closest to the user on the right side) and turn it on
  4. Hold down cmd-option-O-F to boot into open firmware.

Open Firmware harkens back to days when you needed to know things like hardware addresses for things you stuck into your computer, so it’s a bit archaic – but that makes it interesting!

  1. Type dev usb0 ls – you’ve just told Open Firmware that you would like to look at USB0, and then asked for a listing of the stuff attached to USB0.
  2. This should return /disk@1 – so there’s a disk residing on the USB0 bus – neat!
  3. Now type dev disk@1 – now you told Open Firmware that you would like to look at the disk residing at USB0.
  4. Now type pwd – this asks Open Firmware to display the Path Within Device-tree to the thing you’re looking at.
  5. This should return: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1 – this is the literal hardware path, so the PCI bus residing at f2000000 has a USB bus with a few ports, and USB port 1B has a disk image attached to it. Simple, right?
  6. Now for the moment of truth. Type boot /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi and hit enter – “\\:tbxi” basically tells Open Firmware that whatever bootable volume is at this address is ‘blessed’ and can be loaded.
  7. The system will attempt to boot the image on the USB stick.

Now this information is probably useful to all of about a dozen people on the planet, but you never know. And it’s good mental exercise for me to dredge up all of this old useless information on occasion. 🙂

Anyway, Adélie Linux never ran quite right; the desktop appeared, but interacting with it just resulted in the flickers of menus and it was pretty much unusuable.

I went through the installs of a few other *nix distros that had a PPC variant, and eventually landed on MintPPC which seems to run well enough to be worth my time fixing all of the little driver issues.

It’s a hobby…

Listening to "The Touch" by Stan Bush