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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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This one was $99 on ebay with no HDD. I bought a Sun 73 GB SAS drive and caddy but can't remember what I paid for it. Overall I probably got the whole system for less than $150 total, including 128 GB RAM I got on ebay as well. Mine is the 4 core, 32 thread version (it was advertised as the 8 core, but that's ebay for you).
Thanks, do you own any other Sun hardware? What would you recommend for someone who’s never had a Sun system?
My only other one is a Sun Fire T1000. It's a nice system as well, though a generation or so older and, being a 1U system, louder as well. My guess is the fan speeds are higher on the 1U servers to compensate for the more tightly packed chassis. The T1000 is a real howler and makes even this seem tame in comparison.
Either one would be a good choice. They are widely available and fairly cheap right now.
Some scattered thoughts:
There is a noticeable performance improvement with the UltraSPARC T2 vs the older T1. Both of these workhorses are really built for highly concurrent databases, rather than single core performance. Having 32 cores is cool, but doesn't translate to the performance you may expect.
As a full length 2U server, the T5220 is massive, while the T1000 is a far more manageable half-length 1U. If you want a 1U system, but want the UltraSPARC T2, look for a T5120.
The T1000 had a power supply issue when i got it which is apparently common, so maybe get an extra one just in case.
I use Sun SAS drives in mine because they seem pretty decent and are inexpensive, but any brand will work.
Not all systems have a CD/DVD drive. My T1000 does not, so I used the T5220 to install OpenBSD via CD on both hard disks, then just pulled one out and stuck it in the T1000.
Get a couple USB to RJ45 serial cables. I lose the damn things on a regular basis.
Get familiar with Open Firmware because you may have to fiddle with it to get your OS to boot. Since these are secondhand, the previous owners probably had it setup already for their environment. Lots of docs for these servers are available online so this is fairly easy to get going.
Cool, let me know how it goes. Can't speak for the other BSDs but OpenBSD runs great on sparc64, maybe even better than on any other arch.
I can believe that, you know the history of OpenBSD right? Theo was working on sparc32 in NetBSD before the crazy drama that resulted him forking NetBSD into OpenBSD!
Today my family and I booted up the old family eMac to try out some early childhood educational games from my sister and I's childhood. Even my mom recognized some of the games' sound effects and music!
I installed Snow Leopard on my PowerBook 1.67 AI yesterday to triple boot with Leopard and Lubuntu 12.04, and of course it borked my yaboot.
After a struggle with OF and booting from the Live DVD I managed to get back into the Lubuntu desktop but was unable to restore yaboot despite editing yaboot.conf and issuing what should have been the right terminal commands.
In the end I got fed up, destroyed my Linux partitions and gave over the free space to Snowy.
Typing this from 10.6 now
Cheers
Hugh
After a struggle with OF and booting from the Live DVD I managed to get back into the Lubuntu desktop but was unable to restore yaboot despite editing yaboot.conf and issuing what should have been the right terminal commands.
In the end I got fed up, destroyed my Linux partitions and gave over the free space to Snowy.
Typing this from 10.6 now
Cheers
Hugh
@Hughmac : you could have just held option key at powerup and selected linux drive to boot it.
Today i installed Void on my powerbook. It now triple boots Leopard, Ubuntu 12 remix, and Void.
Cheers
Today i installed Void on my powerbook. It now triple boots Leopard, Ubuntu 12 remix, and Void.
Cheers
I tried that. It got into the yaboot screen but when I hit 'L' it kept returning to the Apple boot menu.@Hughmac : you could have just held option key at powerup and selected linux drive to boot it.
Today i installed Void on my powerbook. It now triple boots Leopard, Ubuntu 12 remix, and Void.
View attachment 915738
Cheers
I got to the desktop by booting into the Live DVD and entering hd:8,/boot/vmlinux --no-log , then fiddled around in Terminal for a while.
It's no worry as I'm happy playing with 10.6 for the moment, and I still have my Mint install on the iMac running fine
Cheers
Hugh
I looked at one of them today and looked at another yesterday. The third is out of sight and out of mind. I'm not really doing anything with them at the moment because two (Beige G3 and G4 Yikes!) of the three I own are too damn slow for any real use I might have. The third (12" Powerbook) currently is unusable because the "upgrade by a thousand screws" SSD installation I had attempted didn't turn out so well. I do plan to get the Powerbook up and running again though even if it means putting the old 60GB hard drive back in it.
I used my PowermacG5 to look up where in my town sells a 5/8inch bore cast pulley for a 1 horsepower swamp cooler motor and research pulley/belt adjustment. Annoyingly humorous story behind this. Lowes, Home depot etc all sell 1HP cooler motors - oodles of them. You would think that they would sell a necessary part for functionality. Despite their immense corporate knowledge base & flashy marketing, they opted not to carry these (mind you thats like a Ford garage not carrying common Ford Parts or a grocery store not carrying Milk, bread or eggs). Lowes doesn't. Neither did Home Depot or Walmart (barf) for that matter. The one store that actually did have it, did not show up on a google search.
I ended up finding one at our local small box DIY hardware store - 1 1/2 hours later. No lines. Instant help from knowledgeable servicemen. I am also excited to flash my PCI Radeon 7000 that came in the mail yesterday and will report on that later. Ay dios mio.
I ended up finding one at our local small box DIY hardware store - 1 1/2 hours later. No lines. Instant help from knowledgeable servicemen. I am also excited to flash my PCI Radeon 7000 that came in the mail yesterday and will report on that later. Ay dios mio.
iBooks aren’t exactly what I would call fun to tear into, but they’re not the absolute worst. The biggest thing is having enough space to set all the pieces, and keeping track of the screws. It’s more time consuming than challenging to be honest. Go for it one of these days when you have an hour or three to spare!
I am a web developer by trade and, as a bit of fun, I like to test my websites on PowerPC machines. My thinking is that if they work acceptably well on an old G5, they are going to run blazingly fast on modern machines.
Today, I have been testing my latest project - https://www.chronoflotimeline.com - a service for creating interactive timelines that can be shared on the web. To be honest, I wasn't expecting it to work very well at all, as the website uses a lot of quite modern HTML5 technology and CSS filters. To my surprise, Leopard Webkit renders the website almost perfectly - better indeed than the most up to date version of Safari on El Capitan.
I am now completely in awe of Leopard Webkit, and the developers behind it. With it, we have on 10.5 arguably the best web browser - in terms of rendering - up until around 10.9. I also have renewed respect for my G5 Quad. My website is pretty demanding but it did an admirable job of achieving real-time blur and other CPU-taxing animations.
If you are interested, you can take a look at the timeline shown in the picture here: https://www.chronoflotimeline.com/timeline/shared/3114/USA-Presidents-Timeline/
I'd only recommend you view this link on a G5 or intel machine, if you want a just-about useable experience. I tried testing the timeline on my G4 Mac Cube. It rendered perfectly... after about a minute. For a laugh, view it on Arctic Fox on 10.6.
Not that it matters now, but I've been a patron of Ace Hardware since the mid-80s. It was the only place to get anything in the middle of nowhere town my parents chose to raise my sister and I. It was around before the rise of Home Base, Home Depot, Builders Emporium, Lowes and all the other chains that rose in the late 80s and mid-90s.
I saw some pulleys and evap cooler parts on their site. Ace is usually locally owned and operated and they tend to have the stuff you'd expect Home Depot and Lowes to have, but don't. If they have a store close to you, it might be something to check out. You may be surprised to find them well stocked with what you need and friendly.
And no…I don't work for them.
This is what I see on my Macbook. Maybe I have some dodgey memory or Arctic Fox does not like my graphics card.
My Visiontek Radeon 7000 PCI came in on Friday. I just flashed it in my 400Mhz revB B&W with Graphiccelerator using the gotoh reduced rom on macelite. 64mb + DVI instead of stinky 16mb VGA really tightens up the whole B&W experience for me. I am going to play with some additional tweaks like PCI Extreme 2.1 but my 2yo just woke up so that will have to wait until this afternoon maybe.
Anyhow, very happy about the result thus far. My Blue & White is shaping up into a box I can use. I dropped in wireless, USB2, Sata large drive support and now the 7000 Radeon, there's not much else to do really aside from maxing out the ram which will happen at some point. There is no intent at this time to drop in a aftermarket cpu although if I found one for a good price, I may do it.
Oh yeah, I also picked up a g1 Mbox DAC to pull audio. I may loop this into my audio monitors/workstation at some point. Would be cool to run older software - protools on this box probably considering the DAC. Then again I have some old FW rack DAC gear that I could build up but yanno, space. Anyhow, All in so far:
B&W - $30.00
Sil3512 - $10.00
Radeon7000 $22.00
MBox - $15.00
Wireless - $5.00
USB2 - $7.00
$89.00 bucks in total. Probably hit close to $100USD once I run into some additional ram unless I Have some squirreled away that I am unaware of. I was surprised I was not able to recycle more parts than I could out of all my parts but this B&W is just picky enough and just old enough that most of all of my stuff aside from two Sata spinners made for a very unhappy & unstable B&W and as such could not be used. Whatevs, its the game we play.
Anyhow, very happy about the result thus far. My Blue & White is shaping up into a box I can use. I dropped in wireless, USB2, Sata large drive support and now the 7000 Radeon, there's not much else to do really aside from maxing out the ram which will happen at some point. There is no intent at this time to drop in a aftermarket cpu although if I found one for a good price, I may do it.
Oh yeah, I also picked up a g1 Mbox DAC to pull audio. I may loop this into my audio monitors/workstation at some point. Would be cool to run older software - protools on this box probably considering the DAC. Then again I have some old FW rack DAC gear that I could build up but yanno, space. Anyhow, All in so far:
B&W - $30.00
Sil3512 - $10.00
Radeon7000 $22.00
MBox - $15.00
Wireless - $5.00
USB2 - $7.00
$89.00 bucks in total. Probably hit close to $100USD once I run into some additional ram unless I Have some squirreled away that I am unaware of. I was surprised I was not able to recycle more parts than I could out of all my parts but this B&W is just picky enough and just old enough that most of all of my stuff aside from two Sata spinners made for a very unhappy & unstable B&W and as such could not be used. Whatevs, its the game we play.
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Thanks. Good to know. I’ve been meaning to open up the iBook ever since the CD-ROM drive stopped working properly, but I keep putting it off.
Not that it matters now, but I've been a patron of Ace Hardware since the mid-80s. It was the only place to get anything in the middle of nowhere town my parents chose to raise my sister and I. It was around before the rise of Home Base, Home Depot, Builders Emporium, Lowes and all the other chains that rose in the late 80s and mid-90s.
I saw some pulleys and evap cooler parts on their site. Ace is usually locally owned and operated and they tend to have the stuff you'd expect Home Depot and Lowes to have, but don't. If they have a store close to you, it might be something to check out. You may be surprised to find them well stocked with what you need and friendly.
And no…I don't work for them.
We don’t have those here but we do have True-Value which I patron because the Lowe’s Big box clones of the industry are just that bad. Now I’ll add Samons to the list.
what makes this post just that much more satisfying is I’m jamming Megadeth’s->Warchest->Angry Again Loud AF as I go to install a new local-bought Badger sink disposal for my tenant.
Oh wow! I thought True Value was dead. They used to be huge in California, but when Builder's Emporium and Home Base/Home Depot got big they faded away.We don’t have those here but we do have True-Value which I patron because the Lowe’s Big box clones of the industry are just that bad. Now I’ll add Samons to the list.
what makes this post just that much more satisfying is I’m jamming Megadeth’s->Warchest->Angry Again Loud AF as I go to install a new local-bought Badger sink disposal for my tenant.
Glad they are still around there because they don't exist in Arizona. Yeah, they are another place that has what you need.