[conspire] (forw) Re: For Saturday's CABAL: Advice on old Mac

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Jesse Monroy <jesse650 at gmail.com> -----

Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:52:09 -0700
From: Jesse Monroy <jesse650 at gmail.com>
To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Cc: b c <crawford.bill at gmail.com>
Subject: For Saturday's CABAL: Advice on old Mac

Rick,
A customer of Will Crawford gave us a Power PC/ Power Macintosh
9600/300 with instructions to make a charitable community use of it.
We plan on loading Linux or NetBSD and giving it to a homeless
shelter. We would like your and Diere's (sp) advice on how to
configure the machine for best use, and possibly best donation
strategy.

On a related note, the Daily Post reports today (Aug 10, 2010) that
the "Friends of Palo Alto Library" had a major fire and part of their
facility was lost. The lose includes computers. We may donate to them,
but before that I will call on local book dealers for assistance.
Relate also, The Book Rack in downtown Menlo Park suffered fire damage
months ago -- and they also will need help.

See you Saturday
Jesse

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:34:21 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Jesse Monroy <jesse650 at gmail.com>
Cc: b c <crawford.bill at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: For Saturday's CABAL: Advice on old Mac
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Jesse Monroy (jesse650 at gmail.com):

> Rick,

Hi there!

> A customer of Will Crawford gave us a Power PC/ Power Macintosh
> 9600/300 with instructions to make a charitable community use of it.
> We plan on loading Linux or NetBSD and giving it to a homeless
> shelter. We would like your and Deirdre's advice on how to
> configure the machine for best use, and possibly best donation
> strategy.

It really hinges on the amount of RAM.

The Apple Power Macintosh 9600 series used the then-new PowerPC 604e
CPU.  The 300 MHz model (Aug. 1997 - Feb. 1998) was available with 
anywhere between 64 MB and 768 MB of main RAM, which you got in
increments of 168-pin DIMMs in individual sizes of 8, 16, 32, or 64 MB
each.  There were 12 RAM sockets; thus the 768 MB total capacity.

To give you some idea (other than the cited date) about how ancient this
hardware is, it was replaced in Feb. 1998 by the Power Macintosh G3
minitower.  In other words, you know how slow a G3-based PPC box is?
The 9600 is a bit older and a bit slower.

So, you definitely need to go light on CPU-intensive anything, and the
real remaining question becomes:  How much RAM does it have?  If it has
256 MB or more, then it will be more or less OK with either Linux or
BSD, albeit a bit slow, _provided_ you are careful to keep the runtime
configuration sparse, e.g., use a window manager but not a surrounding
'desktop environment', and are careful what applications get installed
and run.

You _might_ be able to get by with the LXDE 'desktop environment', as
it's pretty lightweight.  Forget about KDE, GNOME, Xfce4.

In the wildly unlikely best case of a machine stuffed to the max with
RAM (768 MB), you have reasonably comfortable RAM by techie standards
and the built software system won't be _too_ slow for novices, but you
still need to err on the sparse side, and the system will still be held
back by a decidedly pokey CPU -- and, of course, almost certainly an
equally slow and ancient hard drive.


Options:

Debian would be good, or CRUX.  Lubuntu or antiX _would_ have been good
(being LXDE-based), but lack PowerPC builds.

OpenSUSE, Fedora, and a bunch of others have PowerPC builds, but you'd
have to strip them down quite a bit after installation, which I'm not
sure is worth the trouble:  Here's a list of all Linux/BSD systems still
supporting PowerPC:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=powerpc&status=Active

NetBSD would of course also be good, though again you'll end up doing 
a lot of configuration work to arrive at an optimised and populated
set of software suitable for a charitable community.


----- End forwarded message -----