#netbsd

Bringing an Old Machine Out of Retirement

I need a better PowerPC development toolchain. What I've been using is broken and incomplete. Were my main computer running … well basically anything other than Windows, getting a cross-compiler running would be pretty straightforward. But I'm not in a position right now to switch to something else.

Sure, I could easily spin up a VM and set up a cross-compiler that way. But — what if it didn't have to be a cross-compiler? If I'm developing for PowerPC, why not use a native PowerPC toolchain running on a PowerPC system? I have this collection of old machines just gathering dust; why not let them be useful again?

I want something that's going to perform well and not slow me down too much. I also want to be able to use modern tools, not fight with period-appropriate software.

So I think there's one clear way to go here: my old PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth, 450MHz) and NetBSD.

When it was first released, the PowerMac G4 was an incredibly powerful machine and it is still very capable. And NetBSD not only runs on everything, it has no problem maintaining current support for ancient architectures long since abandoned by everyone else.

But that doesn't necessarily mean getting it running will be easy. The install kernel on the most recent release ISO was crashing just after initializing video, so I had to drop back to 9.4. I didn't set up my hard drive partitions right the first time, so Open Firmware had no way reach the bootloader and I had to start over. The OS X install disk I used to format and initialize an HFS boot partition wouldn't let me open Terminal, so I couldn't copy the bootloader before install. The BSD disklabel setup process is confusing, to say the least, so my next install attempt failed with an out of disk space error. The install kernel's embedded root image doesn't include HFS partition support, so I couldn't copy the boot loader after installing NetBSD. The MacOS 9.2 install disk won't eject if it's the boot disk (unlike earlier MacOS versions), and I only have one optical drive so I had to install a minimal copy of MacOS 9 onto the HFS partition to boot from long enough to copy the NetBSD bootloader. And then it was a matter of finding the right Open Firmware incantation to boot the NetBSD system instead of MacOS.

I did get there in the end though. I've since been able to set up some essentials — like sudo, my preferred text editor, samba sharing, etc. — with relatively little fuss. So far, it seems to be running just fine; much better than one might expect for an operating system 24 years newer than the hardware!

I love my SPARCstation 5 <3

I've done a variety of things in the past few days, including installing NetBSD and FreeDOS on some of my hard drives to see what they're like on hardware such as this. The answer? Pretty good!

I first installed FreeDOS, which installed just fine. It comes with mouse drivers out of the box and works fine with USB mice and keyboards. It doesn't have support for the AC'97 sound hardware in the machine, understandably so. I could easily remedy this by getting something like a COVOX Speech Thing/other parallel port sound device, or getting a PCI sound card that has DOS drivers.

Next up I installed NetBSD. This was a bit more difficult, in all honesty. I wasn't expecting the OS to have so much trouble with USB devices, but it seems to completely reject the SiS chipset's USB and will hang on boot or present other strange behaviors when it's used.

Eventually though, I was able to get it installed and, other than the lack of USB and sound, it works beautifully, and I know that, once I can migrate this to a bigger disk, it'd make for a wonderful machine to have on hand.

I've been dabbling in short form content, and here's a little YouTube Short I made on my experience with FreeDOS on this machine:

I also took the opportunity to have fun with some of the weird behaviors that NetBSD was showing while trying to boot from USB:

Why is pkgin idling for 15 minutes?