SHAOS

After some evenings I had increased screen size of my Beige G3 from 800×600 to 1152×864 (65536 colors):Then I installed 2 cheap ($20 each) PCI-cards in it: first is 2xCOM-ports:and second is 1xLPT-port:Basically it is the same card with different assembling…. Continue Reading

This is my home working place where I can port software from little-endian machine to big-endian:Red table bought in IKEA. Right-bottom: Systemax server with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 ГГц (Slackware 12.2). Right-top: PowerMac G4 Cube (colored to black) with Debian 5.0 and preloaded libfreevec. Left-bottom: subwoofer Logitech, power adapter for Cube and Gigabit switch. Left-top: UPS CyberPower 1500AVR. In the center under the table: KVM IOGEAR (switching USB keyboard+mouse and VGA between both machines). In the center on the … Continue Reading

My PowerMac G4 400MHz with Debian GNU/Linux 4.1 (that works as my home server and internet gateway since last summer) just got 157 days uptime (without reboots since January 28th 2009) before yesterday strange hanging that was resolved by manual rebooting…P.S. Electric power stability is provided by APC Back-UPS ES 750 that may keep the server working without electricity for more than 40 minutes!

Recently I bought Power Mac G3 (300MHz, 64MB RAM, Ethernet, CD-ROM and no HDD) for $9.99 (plus shipping $32.50):To make it working I added CompactFlash 2GB (around $10) and CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter (around $5):Adapter has female IDE connector to allow connection direcrly to motherboard. Also I put new battery ($5) there:… Continue Reading

Again I tested new hardware using my memcpy benchmark – now for my 1st desktop on Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz and my 2nd desktop on PowerPC G4 450 MHz (black G4 Cube). Here you can see not-aligned (nal) and aligned (al) results and also “vectorized” results (G4-450v-nal and G4-450v-al) where memcpy was AltiVec optimized version from libfreevec v1.0.4.P.S. If you want optimized AltiVec versions of such functions as bmove512, memccpy, memchr, memcmp, … Continue Reading

I decided to use G4 Cube as my second desktop computer. But my first desktop PC is black. So I bought black enamel spray for a reason to paint Cube to black color. The subject to turn black is internal metallic case:Now I have stylish black colored G4 Cube with Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” on board P.S. Lenny believes that X.org became smart enough to … Continue Reading

OK, I got Debian GNU/Linux on my desktop Power Macintosh G3 “Beige” BUT, to do this I bought MacOS 9 CD for 20 dollars on ebay:Because I broke pre-installed MacOS by trying to install Debian on this “OldWorld” mac (see here). So, after installing MacOS 9 back I again tried to install Debian (using BootX 1.2.2 from MacOS). After a number of tries of reinstallation of both I realized that MacOS 9 and Debian CAN’T live on the same … Continue Reading

Finally I did it – I bought G4 Cube for myself! $250 (plus shipping) for PowerPC G4 450 MHz system is a little bit expensive, but it’s CUBE:It even has “cracks” (as probably all G4 cubes Of course I put Debian GNU/Linux on it and removed MacOS 9.2 that was preinstalled there.One strange (for me) thing about G4 Cube is its power … Continue Reading

A few days ago I bought Power Macintosh G3 with PowerPC G3 processor (300MHz) for 25 dollars (and 45 shipping):It has old Apple monitor connector and because of that I needed VGA-adapter (5 dollars on ebay) to connect my Samsung 19″ monitor to this machine:It was shipped with MacOS 9 onboard that can handle screen dimension up to 1280×1024 (with 256 colors):… Continue Reading

Some benchmarks of memcpy function on my Compaq Presario S6000NX Celeron 2.7 GHz (Linux), PowerMac G4 400 MHz (Linux) and PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz (Linux and Mac OS X):As we can see vectorized memcpy on PowerPC G4 1.67 GHz almost twice as fast as Celeron 2.7 GHz (which is sometimes similar to speed of vectorized memcpy on PowerPC G4 400 MHz). Also we see that Mac OS X has vectorized memcpy by default. See source code of … Continue Reading