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

[Rick Moen]

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

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:13:21 -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.

There's also a second bit of bad news for you:  ROMs.

The Apple Power Macintosh 9600 still used what were called 'Old World
ROMs', which were an incomplete implementation of Open Firmware, 
posing challenges to bootloaders and kernels.  See: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_World_ROM

You thus need to make sure the Linux or BSD distro you have in mind
supports Old World ROMs on PowerPC Macintoshes.  For example, CRUX does
not, and would otherwise have been an excellent choice.  OpenBSD does
not.

Debian does.  NetBSD does.

You should also be aware that the machine is going to be inherently
fragile as to its hardware.  It's 12-13 years old!

Also, a member of CABAL's Conspire mailing list points out, the first
time a naive user attempts to load Adobe/Macromedia Flash content from
the Web on the 9600, one of two things is going to happen:

1.  Nothing happens for lack of a Flash interpreter.  (Not
    surprisingly, there's no Adobe/Macromedia proprietary Flash
    interpreter for Linux or BSD on PowerPC.)  This is the optimal
    case.

2.  The browser invokes one of the open-source attempts to reverse-
    engineer Flash (Gnash or swfdec), if you've installed one.  At 
    which point, the machine falls over from CPU and RAM load.

Consider the possibility that the best operating system for this
particular relic might be Apple OS 9.0.



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