On 12/6/18, Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hey - so I picked up a couple of very pretty but backbreakingly-heavy Apple G5s - one dual-core, the other dual-processor single core. I know these are old machines (2005) and vastly inefficient compared to modern machines: there are faster ARM SBCs. G5s make amazing room heaters when they are busy.
I do appreciate well-built heavy metal. I picked up a couple as well.
Distro support seems to have completely dropped away for these machines. ppc64el is alive and well on IBM servers, but PowerMacs are big-endian.
Anyone using ppc64 here? What distro would you recommend? Debian used to have ppc64 support, but its last release is in LTS with no future releases planned.
I got Debian Jessie installed OK. I had some graphics hassles by virtue of a kernel upgrade to the 4.9 backport, but got that sorted out by rebuilding the kernel with slight config redecoration. It might just boot X fine with the native Jessie (3.14?) kernel - I didn't try. Jessie even manages power and those prodigious fans just nicely. When it's all running properly it's even fairly quiet. With my not-quite-properly configured kernel, it's gale-force shortly after boot. Sounds a lot like a multi-POWER server that I remember a certain TLUG member working on :-) Cheers, Mike