PowerMac G4 dual 1.25 GHz MDD

My “new” home server/router: PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz MDD ($400 with monitor) with Debain/GNU Linux 5.0. It has 123 days uptime already!

• added ‘\r’ to function “isspace” in ctype.hop
• fixed function “dir” in system_win.hop
• path to libraries changed to /usr/local/share/hopeless
• created man file hopeless.1 (modified hope.1)
• fixed “make install” for Hopeless
• new library lib/db_sqlite.hop (database support with sqlite3)
• added functions “del” and “write_to” to lib/system.hop
• check for ‘\n’ and ‘\r’ before run commands (“!…”)
• defined constant “stdin” instead of functions “getc” and “gets” (lib/system.hop)
• modified test _input.hop

Source code: hopeless-v0.5.tar.bz2 (100K)
For more info see www.hopelog.com where you can find all previous versions of Hopeless plus Win32 binaries.

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.

Now I can use it as a regular Linux PC for example to connect El Cheapo PIC-programmer to Debian’s Piklab:

Kernel recompilation was required to allow using of module ppdev that creates device /dev/parport0

So this machine officially became my hobby lab machine

P.S. Unfortunately I was not able to run on this machine any USB PCI-card that I had…

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!

P.P.S. Last “north-easter” poweroutage proved that my system’s up time without electricity is 75 minutes!!!

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:

Then I installed Debian Linux on it and got working 300MHz PowerPC G3 system for below than $70. I think it’s pretty cheap

P.S. If you want optimized AltiVec versions of such functions as bmove512, memccpy, memchr, memcmp, memcpy, memfrob, memmove, mempcpy, memrchr, memset, strcmp, strcpy, strlen, strncmp, strncpy, strnlen and swab for everything in your Linux system, then just put (of course after successful libfreevec installation) line /usr/local/lib/libfreevec_libc.so to file /etc/ld.so.preload (you can create this file if it’s not yet available) – thanks to Konstantinos Margaritis (author of libfreevec)!

Update: Black big-endian and little-endian

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 hard-drive, because they are breaking partition table for each other…

So I’d decided to go to ebay again – now for SCSI drive. 18 GB IBM SCSI drive (1997) with 50-pin adapter was just 30 dollars plus 4 for cable and 11 for shipping.

Important things about installation on Beige G3:

• it will fail to detect printer, simply go back to menu and choose installation again;
• bootloader quik requires ext2 partition for /boot (even if it’s not needed – I pressed NO later to disable bootloader installation);
• it is important to save vmlinux and initrd.img on ZIP-drive before reboot – we will need it in MacOS for BootX loader – so go to shell and do chroot /target then mount /dev/hdd4 /mnt then cd /boot then cp vmlinux /mnt and cp initrd.img /mnt then umount /mnt then exit and exit to go to menu back;
• then just finish installation process.

So now I have MacOS 9.2.2 on EIDE hard-drive and GNU/Linux on SCSI hard-drive – separately they work fine. After boot computer goes to MacOS first and then using BootX loader I can choose to go to Linux (copy vmlinux and initrd.img to Linux Kernels first).

Inside Linux I traditionally have Russian user interface:

P.S. After installation of Debian 4.0r7 from NetInst CD I found that during installation it’s magically transformed to Debian 5.0 “Lenny” that was released just now

P.P.S. So if you need cheap PowerPC machine for Linux, DON’T buy Beige G3! Better choice is Blue&White PowerMac G3 that can be bought just for $9.99 (plus $32.50 for shipping) in some places (300 MHz, 64 MB RAM, no HDD) – see here story how I got it

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 button that is not a button at all…

Now I can measure power usage of my electric devices, and as we can se Cube eats only 30 watts (actually it goes between 25 and 45 watts):

Probably I will use this G4 Cube in my home “grid” network for distributed computing…

Updated: Cube became black!