Anyone has an experience? I wanna try installing it as a second system. Instructions online appear to be pre-historic, while PowerPC (incl. ppc64) should be fully supported in the latest FreeBSD 13.
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FreeBSD on PowerMac G5?
- Thread starter barracuda156
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FreeBSD is tier 2 on PowerPC. It’ll probably work, and some things will run but the general consensus seems to be OpenBSD is the BSD to use on PowerPC Macs. It has better support and more packages.
Both of which are not particularly easy to set up fully with a working desktop even on x86-64 systems.
Yes I’d imagine it would; it does specify being built for FreeBSD after-all. Wether it compiles on PPC is another question.
Both my desktop GUI FreeBSD machines are x86 and amd64 respectively so I can’t tell you what problems there would be on PPC. But this does look interesting and I might install it on my FreeBSD box one of these days…
I ran freebsd 12 on my powermac g5 a while back. I don't recall there being too much in the repo so i had to compile most things from pkgsrc. I remember x11 took almost all day to compile for me
Someone had a real pain on G4: http://tingo.homedns.org/machines/apple_powerbook_g4/freebsd/
Old MacBook Pro works fine though: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/success-installing-freebsd-13-0-on-macbook-pro-5-5.80458/
Old MacBook Pro works fine though: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/success-installing-freebsd-13-0-on-macbook-pro-5-5.80458/
It was a dual 1.8ghz pci-x model. I may have been doing something wrong, I was still pretty inexperienced with freebsd and compiling stuff when i did it.
It seems a bit strange that some prefer Open* or Net*, given that FreeBSD is more Mac-compatible – at least it has some support in Macports, so provisionally familiar tools will work.
OpenBSD/macppc has some binary packages at least; on the other two you need to do quite a bit of compiling, which means that they’re not as quick or straightforward to set up. And for e.g. me, having binary packages is a plus.
Looks like there is partial compatibility for some versions of NetBSD and OSX if one trusts Wikipedia:
Mach-O - Wikipedia
"Some versions of NetBSD have had Mach-O support added as part of an implementation of binary compatibility, which allowed some Mac OS 10.3 binaries to be executed.[5][6]"
- Emmanuel Dreyfus (June 20, 2006). "Mach and Darwin binary compatiblity [sic] for NetBSD/powerpc and NetBSD/i386". Retrieved October 18, 2013.
- Emmanuel Dreyfus (September 2004), Mac OS X binary compatibility on NetBSD: challenges and implementation (PDF)
Part of the conclusions of the second paper:
"As of today, NetBSD-current is able to run most command line tools from Mac OS X. Mac OS X Programs using the X11 graphical user interface such as Matlab or Open Office should work too, though nobody explored that area yet. It is difficult to give an idea of when NetBSD will be able to run Aqua applications, because we do not really know the issues we are going to encounter and solve. Moreover, some event could shorten the delay: if some Quartz display server become available for NetBSD (for instance as an open source Mac OS X remote desktop project), it would remove the major problem."
I will give it a try in the other direction one of these days, i.e. see if some command-line tools from a Mach-O NetBSD distro can be run on OSX
In any case, if this is really true, it's a few points for FreeBSD!
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A bit off-topic. Anybody tried to install Darwin & use it? Personally I know nothing about it, only that this thing is under hood of MacOS X 
I played a bit with Darwin 8.0.1 (Tiger 10.4.0) because that was the last version Apple provided installable binaries for, but didn't do much with it. There's also PureDarwin which is based on a much newer version and they provide a disk image.A bit off-topic. Anybody tried to install Darwin & use it? Personally I know nothing about it, only that this thing is under hood of MacOS X
Yes, I had it for x86 a couple of years in the run up to the transition, it was very limited but it did have the right platform kexts to run on a standard PCA bit off-topic. Anybody tried to install Darwin & use it? Personally I know nothing about it, only that this thing is under hood of MacOS X
And if I remember it wasn't the infamous "ADP" kext used in combination with the Maxxus bootloader in the early days of OSx86.There are modern versions of it still available as PureDarwin (apple has not published a full iso with full sources since Darwin 8), but not compiled for ppc, except for a few versions I think and not up to the latest one, checkout http://www.puredarwin.org/
Cheers,
The fact that Darwin was always publicly available for x86 but Mac OS X wasn't (until 2005) kinda felt like an "adding insult to injury" move to me. I mean, they provided the core of Mac OS X but deprived PC users of the gorgeous UI... At this point, I thought that I might as well run some other BSD or Linux on my PC then.Yes, I had it for x86 a couple of years in the run up to the transition, it was very limited but it did have the right platform kexts to run on a standard PC
Speaking of which, does anyone know if PureDarwin Xmas or later was ever compiled for ppc?
Looks like there is partial compatibility for some versions of NetBSD and OSX if one trusts Wikipedia:
Mach-O - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
"Some versions of NetBSD have had Mach-O support added as part of an implementation of binary compatibility, which allowed some Mac OS 10.3 binaries to be executed.[5][6]"
I have gone through the second one which I also found by chance, looks like while most of the CLI stuff is okay, a lot of the X11 stuff could be an issue (as NetBSD uses X-Windows and Darwin/OSX XQuartz that are similar but somewhat different), but the author states that XFree86 provides XDarwin which provides IOKit, IOFramebuffer and IOHIDSystem.
- Emmanuel Dreyfus (June 20, 2006). "Mach and Darwin binary compatiblity [sic] for NetBSD/powerpc and NetBSD/i386". Retrieved October 18, 2013.
- Emmanuel Dreyfus (September 2004), Mac OS X binary compatibility on NetBSD: challenges and implementation (PDF)
Part of the conclusions of the second paper:
"As of today, NetBSD-current is able to run most command line tools from Mac OS X. Mac OS X Programs using the X11 graphical user interface such as Matlab or Open Office should work too, though nobody explored that area yet. It is difficult to give an idea of when NetBSD will be able to run Aqua applications, because we do not really know the issues we are going to encounter and solve. Moreover, some event could shorten the delay: if some Quartz display server become available for NetBSD (for instance as an open source Mac OS X remote desktop project), it would remove the major problem."
I will give it a try in the other direction one of these days, i.e. see if some command-line tools from a Mach-O NetBSD distro can be run on OSX
In any case, if this is really true, it's a few points for FreeBSD!
Thank you, perhaps an interesting point. Wonder if some fixes on NetBSD can be ported to macOS PPC.
I used to install openbsd on powerbook G3, had to disable the video driver; not good experience as it does not support essential functions that a laptop computer should have: sleep, display turn off, etc. Then I gave up; On my PowerMac G5, openBSD works well, only cons is 3.5G memory due to 32bit mode.
FreeBSD is the only system supporting ppc64, but we need to either wait until upstream fixes the current issue or downgrade to 12.4 (I think), which works fine.