Installing OpenBSD on the Fastest iMac G3

[@ActionRetro]

Use code ACTIONRETRO50 to get 50% off your first Factor box at bit.ly/46cii6F!

[@zacforrest]

Can you add the link for the adapter the iMac g3 likes? I am having my terrible luck finding one

[@coolhandle572]

That thing looks disgusting

[@DanaDoesStuff]

(iMac on its side wtih guts hanging out) "OK, so, I've run into some problems..." ACTION RETROOOO

[@ActionRetro]

🤣

[@simplyalonso]

🤣

[@joemamium]

🤣

[@TheCerealHobbyist]

I heard that like “Captain Caaaaveman” in my head.

[@Aviancorporation]

🤣

[@Roizor]

5:40 - Those block errors are simply the hard drive being in a format OpenBSD didn’t understand, or it’s Inodes (references to blocks) were corrupted. If you were partitioning the drive at that moment, that’s fine because then it’s trying to understand where the next block in the drive is. Most of those errors come from fsck, filesystem check, and are harmless to your data, even though it can take a second to get through them. Fsck is simply trying to fix your systems understanding of the drive👍👍

[@morganb900]

Makes sense if he hadn't formatted it yet for bsd like it had something else on it. Might have been alright unless he installed on it and it was still saying a bunch of stuff

[@Nny_V]

as far as i'm aware that imac and most computers from the late 90s don't support 48bit disk access so anything above 120gb wouldn't work correctly, there are workarounds i'm aware of with pc's idk about old imacs.

[@stale2665]

@@Nny_V I had this problem on a pc laptop from 2004. The OS can see the real size of the drive, but BIOS issues would cause errors and/or corruption past 137GB. I solved it by just formatting drives bigger than that to 137GB and not using the remaining space.

[@Nny_V]

@@stale2665one workaround i used to do, well for desktops at least was to use a smaller drive for windows, and disable the other larger drives in the bios, this way windows would detect the full size of the drives without issues. even did this trick with win98 on a old AST that had the 8gb CHS limit issue, to get a 20gb drive working in that. though i found out about disk overlay software and all the unofficial patches for windows to address more space recently. you can even get windows 95/98 working with 2-3gb of ram, and get 32bit xp working with like 64gb of ram with a PAE patch though that's just silly.

[@tin2001]

​@@Nny_V That is usually not a problem once booted into an OS that understands it. Also, there's a load of random capacity issues in BIOSes before you get to that limit. Arbitrary limits on a bunch of values that lead to things like 2GB, 20GB, 32GB and ~60GB limits. Most of those you have to prevent the BIOS autodetecting the drive, and boot off a smaller disk.

[@adamsfusion]

"It couldn't be easier!" _cuts to gutted computer_ is my favorite AR meme

[@KabelkowyJoe]

5:00 It's not fault of an adapter* IDE ATA in general is limited to 28bits x 512B = 137GB (128GiB) , Apple "BIOS" is probably also limited and/or have some ways to negotiate proper mode for adressing. In PC world i was able for example boot 160GB Hitachi HDD on such old machine only if Windows was installed on smaller partition. Then trough some magic once booted the other partition was available to store data. Otherwise if one partition was used system was crashing. Linux wasn't able to boot at all. WD Black 250GB IDE on other hand only 128GB was visible even in Windows. Same was for any SSD. Since BSD probably it's installing itself on ZFS or UFS partition and formating putting inodes and stuff. And it's doing in "BIOS" mode so cant adress more.

[@ethanpschwartz]

The same iMac got me through my first year of undergrad, but mine was Indigo! That baby wrote dozens of papers, edited photos, and even edited a video and attached it to a PowerPoint for an A+ final presentation on OPEC.

[@der.Schtefan]

Seeing WindowMaker transported me back to 1998, and caused an existential crisis. Why am I so old? Why do my knees always hurt? What happened to my face? Where has the time gone by?

[@livefreeprintguns]

12:00 BRO ALL THE NOSTALGIA! WindowMaker was my window manager of choice... I was always running the latest version. I dabbled a little with AfterStep (which I really liked) but WindowMaker seemed to hit all the right notes for me.

[@sonic2000gr]

Windowmaker is one of my favorite environments for FreeBSD desktops. Incidentally NetBSD is the BSD distribution known for running in most (obscure and obsolete) architectures. I wonder if it will run on this.

[@tommythetoe]

Of course it runs NetBSD

[@redstone0234]

If it has a CPU and a MMU It runs NetBSD

[@sniglom]

This threw me back to when I was running netbsd on hpc-mips. Many years since I ran Dillo.

[@danaeckel5523]

Pretty cool. Amazing how modern OS's work on such old machines. I have NetBSD 9.2 running on a 68040 Quadra 800 with X11 and Dillo browser. I also have beige G4(upgrade) with Debian Bookworm and surf the net with Netsurf.

[@sonicunleashedfan124]

I wonder if it’s possible to use netBSD on a 68030 Mac?

[@IkarusKommt]

Operating systems are primitive so they work everywhere. Useful applications, however...

[@bomlife1572]

“Amazing how modern OS's work on such old machines” not Windows 11 though

[@JohnMiller-mmuldoor]

@@IkarusKommtyeah… I remember the last time I tried to use old hardware with useful applications was like mid 2010s. pentium 3 running Debian I could get Google Chrome to run a couple tabs. A G3 Lombard MacBook I could browse facebook on Iceweasel (firefox clone). but that was 10 years ago. I have no idea what I’d be able to do nowadays.

[@LouiesWorkshop]

I read the browser name as something else.

[@bokkenka]

The USB trouble might be because it's a USB3 stick. I've seen older hardware have trouble with USB3 devices even though they are s'posed to be backward compatible.

[@Valthonis]

same. I had an issue with an older x86 PC and it only liked 2.0 USB drives

[@Duamerthrax]

I don't think USB3 is suppose to be backwards to USB1. At least that's what I heard. I keep some USB2 drives around for that reason.

[@bokkenka]

@@Duamerthrax -- Allegedly, 3 is compatible back to 1.1. But, I've seen some not work in a 2 socket. I've never tried anything less than that.

[@lukaszwodzynskiHNB]

I've once had a keyboard that required 3.0 because it's rgb consumed too much power for 1/2.0

[@pedropassamani]

G3s and early G4s ATA controllers have a drive size limit of 128 GB. That's why dosdude1's drive had issues. On Power Macs you have the option to install a PCI controller (usually SATA) to enable usage of larger drives, but that's not possible with iMacs, for obvious reasons.

[@cheyopimienta]

It's just easier to use an IDE to CF adapter and a 64 GB card. It will still be faster than those old IDE drives

[@JoseRodriguez-dx4pb]

Firewire is another option, I remember an iMac reading drives well over 128gb at 400Mbps, it was considerably faster, if I remember correctly, it's been a while 😅

[@BrianMoore-uk6js]

I seem to remember the maximum partition size was 8GB, at least on some G3s.

[@pedropassamani]

@@BrianMoore-uk6js Yep, that's a thing too. Beige G3s, tray-loading iMacs and Wallstreet/PDQ PowerBooks for sure (can't remember if the Kanga and Lombard PowerBooks, and 1st Gen iBooks, are affected). Wallstreets and maybe others (don't remember if the Kanga and Lombard PowerBooks are included; iBooks are not IIRC).

[@RWBHere]

I have a 12-inch G4 iBook, running Leopard from a 320 GByte HDD with no issues@@pedropassamani So I can confirm that the later iBooks seem to be OK past the 137 GB limit, at least with OS X.

[@AdrianPatten]

I used Openbsd (headless install) for my Firewall back in the early ADSL1 days. (Around 2002) It was the most secure/locked down OS back then and probably still is.

[@fergatronanator]

The moment he said it was as simple as "putting the iso on a thumb drive", I knew it would be an ordeal hahahaha

[@ran2wild370]

On the other hand... Wmaker is really impressive on this setup. I used it on my socket7 machine ~133Pentuim equivalent from IDT C6 200Mhz.

[@GeoStreber]

Whenever I try to download dillo, my autocomplete does something annoying. :-(

[@Thiesi]

I usually run NetBSD on all my old hardware like PowerPC Macs and SparcStations. Works like a charm!

[@PaulFisher]

That was the one thing I thought when watching-OpenBSD is widely compatible (and it looks like it’s working well), but I understand that NetBSD is the one best known for portability.

[@notanimposter]

I’m blown away by how snappy that UI is. I used to have an iMac G3 and I would have killed for that level of responsiveness on a Unix-like OS.

[@tlhunter]

I was given one of these 700mhz models a couple months ago and finally got it working. I didn't realize you were looking for one!

[@_..-.._..-.._]

I’m jealous 😮 I’ve wanted a 600/700 so bad! The 700 are so rare being a one time SE

[@PamiiruqSorrell]

You're making me want to daily drive my iMac G3 now!

[@UpandDownRacing]

Good that you show thats it's not all plain sailing, USB boot was always buggy on g3 macs from my experience so i always preferred firewire boot.

[@retropuffer2986]

Runs pretty good for a 90s era computer. Love the system's pufferfish mascot! 🐡

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

That would be Puffy. Of course the best OS in the world needs a good mascot. :)

[@spelledfunny]

Ok, going from old memories, that entire family of iMacs had a maximum hard drive size of 128GB. There was a firmware update for some of the transition era machines that patched it, but I’m not sure if these iMacs got it. So you’ll need to get a smaller SSD from dosdude1. I’d try to stay at 100-120GB to stay safe. As for booting off USB, the USB controller in those things are pretty strict standards-wise, and they don’t like newer faster USB drives. It’ll probably work fine with a USB 1.0, 1.1, or USB 2.0 drive. But many older Macs don’t want to talk to a USB 3.0 flash drive. Even my old 2015 MacBook Pro didn’t like USB 3.0 drives, but would talk USB 2.0 drives consistently.

[@damouze]

I have fond memories of WindowMaker. I ran it on just about any computer that could run Linux. I even wrote my final thesis in StarOffice on a Linux PC that ran WindowMaker. One of my fellow students even created a Matrix inspired theme for it which just about everyone of us used. Great to see an old-iMac given some love.

[@KabelkowyJoe]

Second adapter 5:45 you put is actually translating SATA to ATA, it's most proably limited in speed like most of these and because of that (oddly enough) i suspect fast HDD's could be even faster than SSD in some cases. Maybe in order to work it have to know "the language" of adressing of iMac "BIOS" maybe it's fault of 256GB drive itself it can't negotiate or something. Or it's just about the size - since you put 128GB MSATA

[@ran2wild370]

Back in 2012 some kind of Samsung (F3) 1TB HDD on some operations (I guess that was copying a bunch of small files) so it was faster than then new a top of the budget segment OCZ Vertex4 128 gigs.

[@hayleyunknown9517]

"This will be easy!" Cue hardware problems. Makes me laugh every time.

[@brian2590]

G3 imacs were some of the first machines i installed OpenBSD on. This was back in 2002. As far as i know it's always worked well on these machines. I had a few running IRC servers and icecast for a bit. The dual headphone out was great for csound programming. this allowed me to run into multiple effects pedals and a mixer. I found the default console font was nice and crisp. They made great terminals at the time. It looks like they still do. This takes me back. Windowmaker was my goto. All you need now is the bubblemon applet. 😎

[@kaleyjoplinRAWRR]

I remember my classroom had one of these but in tangerine . I always loved these translucent Macs but never got to own one :(

[@livefreeprintguns]

OpenBSD was my first true love when it came to operating systems... I think the first release I ever installed was 2.3 and ran it as my daily driver on all my workstations for the longest time. I also donated a bunch of hardware to the project as well as a few kernel patches I made (specifically for the USB and wireless subsystems) that made it into the mainline source tree! EDIT: some of the modifications I submitted were in fact to fix USB quirks in booting OpenBSD from USB sticks... they weren't PPC related but you would be amazed (or not, lol) at how finicky some USB chipsets are!

[@ImageJPEG]

BSDs rock! I'm using FreeBSD on both my laptop and gaming desktop computer. No dual boot here!

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

As a fellow (Open)BSD´er I salute you sir. BSD´s indeed rock.

[@mgord9518]

Do you only play FOSS games or use the Linux compatibility with Steam?

[@ImageJPEG]

@@mgord9518 whatever I can get to work, including Wine. Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Quake 3 (ioquake3) and the Linux version of Unreal Tournament 99 (which is getting new patches lately).

[@CDP-1802]

I ran NetBSD on my graphite iMac DV/SE back in the day and I remember it being an open firmware nightmare to get installed. When you said it couldn’t be easier to get installed only to cut to that iMac on its side made me laugh out loud 😂 I also ran NetBSD for years on an SE/30 with an PDS Ethernet card, it was super slow but ran named and Apache 1.3 just fine, also there was no screensaver so I just had the brightness turned all the way down…

[@lhpl]

I ran NetBSD on my iMac DV SE too, and on my Mac II ci. Worked just fine. Compiling everything from source with pkgsrc was a bit of a hassle though. I finally gave up on using NetBSD on all my hardware around 2012 or so. (Including a few versions of Lenovo ThinkPads.) I was tired of not having a native Java (my netbanking at the time required a Java applet for Mozilla, and patching the JDK source code to make it build, and then building it was not for the faint-of-heart), and the frequent need to rebuild most of the installed packages as new releases came along, often taking days, not to mention every time something broke. Although I haven't been too impressed by Linux either, and have switched distro several times since, first Xubuntu, then Mint Debian edition, then MX, and now Devuan. Today Linux users seem to almost start crying if there isn't a gui interface so they have to do stuff from the shell...😂

[@theapplguy]

I did the OpenBSD Install with a DosDude SSD 128gb and the Short IDE 2.5" to 3.5" board and it worked effortlessly.., I tried the 256gb and had all the same problems you had. Suffice to say, my Lime 333ghz iMac's do not like drives over 128gb!

[@tylerdean980]

I always like BSD content, I don't know what my favorite UNIX-like OS is, but Linux does more, so that's what I use, but OpenBSD is super simple and minimal enough to run on hardware even older than this. NetBSD runs on a lot of niche things too, like the Sega Dreamcast and the 486 if your neckbeard is long enough

[@js-123]

Try NetBSD next, which is truly the world's most compatible operating system (it runs on way more platforms than OpenBSD if you look at the list) and it might be quite a bit faster on such an old machine as well :)

[@Yep6803]

It is a shame that isn't natively compatible with MacOS

[@Cmdrbzrd]

@@Yep6803 basically nothing is, there is no true WINE equiv for MacOS

[@mileswurster2035]

This design still holds up. What a gorgeous computer.

[@psergiu]

The VLC & Abuse packages might have been compiled with Altivec/G4 support

[@StrangelyIronic]

I haven't really messed with OpenBSD, but I run FreeBSD on my main SBC I do Arm64 Assembly programming on. If I'm going to have an OS I "tinker" with, it's pretty much always FreeBSD anymore. I used to run Arch, then Manjaro, but now I'm happily on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for Linux (gives me rolling release while going back to my Fedora/OpenSUSE roots with RPM+zypper). That means there's not really any need for the same level of tinkering to get things working properly. Honestly, I find myself using my FreeBSD SBC for all of my daily tasks too (with 16gb of ram, an m.2 ssd, and a great little cpu/gpu package it handles most tasks easily). BSD is a different beast, but I think it's something people should give a try in a VM just to mess around if they enjoy messing around with Linux or even macOS.

[@torondin]

Tbh, in terms of media playback, you might have better results trying something using Xine or MPlayer for the backend.

[@KD5NJR]

Nice to see that machine still on the road

[@yugen042]

Most compatible modern OS hmmm. would have to give that crown to NetBSD though.

[@SvexTheDragon]

Hey, may I suggest trying out one of the AROS releases for one of your videos? Icaros Desktop being X86 compatible comes to mind first. It's a bit finnicky to get running, especially with what kind of hardware you try to run it on but I think it would make for a pretty fun video! The main ISO for it even comes with a ton of old Amiga software to play with.

[@ActionRetro]

oh interesting! i'll check it out!

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

I would LOVE to see more of these old machines being used for modern uses- common things like basic documents, spreadsheets, and stuff... Sure they can't game modern games or rock HD on KZbin... but just having use at all for basic things REALLY saves these from E-waste trash.

[@inthestudy]

I wish there was more love for CDE. It was such a good user interface back in the day. At least it (and Tracker/Deskbar on Haiku) are still under development. :)

[@bluephreakr]

That reaction fro the computer at 13:10 is how I feel about Linux every _damn_ day of the week.

[@TaijanDean]

Awesome stuff! Its so neat to see these computers run new Operating System like it's nothing - excluding the houra it takes to set it up that is 😄 I just bought a BlueSCSIV2 and was wondering if you were going to do a video solely on it and all of its new features, including WIFI.

[@Storm_.]

BlueSCSIv2 is amazing! It supports Daynaport SCSI Ethernet, over Wifi! So basically gives internet access over the SCSI bus, as well as drives.

[@brydon10]

It's very cool to see OpenBSD on this system.

[@jacobpalm]

Well that was certainly a fun project to follow along with on my iMac G4 700! I didn't have to do any of the graphics config, it worked out of the box. I installed WindowsMaker like you for that sweet, sweet NeXTSTEP feel and I love it. Thank you for this video!

[@MaxOakland]

The graphite color is so cool

[@frugalprepper]

I got a bunch of these cheap from a school back in 2007/2008. I put Tiger on them, upgraded the RAM and sold them all. I made good money on them too. People will pay way too much for a Mac.

[@SebMcC2007]

Nice nice. Thanks to this video I was able to install OpenBSD on my PowerBook G4. And it works like a charm!

[@ActionRetro]

Great to hear!

[@aflury]

I thought NetBSD was the most compatible operating system. I recall a colleague installing it on our office's SEGA Dreamcast when those were around.

[@SalivatingSteve]

I like how your mouse is a mouse! It's odd you couldn't get VLC working. I remember using VLC on my 450Mhz G4 running OS X 10.3 back in 2006, so the hardware is capable of it.

[@Spectere]

I wonder if it had something to do with him using a 256-color video mode (note the palette shift when he launched VLC). I wouldn't be surprised if the VLC team (or their supporting libraries) dropped support for that over the years, or simply allowed code rot to set in.

[@anidnmeno]

4:35 right as I was thinking "Does this count as 'shenanigans?'"

[@machrider2333]

Hey Sean, did you know you can wipe some high quality mink oil (like for boots or whatever) on those iMac G3 speaker’s foam surrounds to preserve them for the ages? Should they already be rotted out, your mileage will vary.

[@RandonBrown]

Simply awesome! I would have newer guessed that that old beast can run a modern os and looks still so fast with graphic desktop.

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

The BSD´s are unbeatable. And that window manager (FVWM) is the best and most powerful WM ever made, and also only need about 50MB of RAM with a basic config. Imagine the performance i get on my 2008 eight core Mac Pro with the AMD64 version of OpenBSD 7.4 and FVWM.

[@peporgan]

Good luck with the livestream plans! But I'm not sure how'd you're going to get a real video feed with USB 1.1, unless you're actually using a USB 1.1 webcam?

[@TRLTheRandomLab]

Dillo! Not to be confused with.... oh no.. a certain village in Newfoundland

[@lettuce7378]

It would be really cool to buy an old powerbook or powermac but powerpc compatible desktop OSes are getting harder to find, everyone keeps dropping PowerPC support. Good on OpenBSD for continuing to support such ancient machines lol

[@evanpasquale7554]

I just love how they casually support PPC

[@vilhelm479]

IIRC its mostly NetBSD's work as they brand themselves as "Of course it runs on NetBSD" and OpenBSD is distant cousin-fork with a lot of code overlap. Might be talking out of my ass now, but i'm on my phone and this is what i remember :)

[@halfsourlizard9319]

I forgot about Dillo; pretty great browser ... 100% getting installed on one of my definitely-not-BSD boxes today :}

[@lauriewired]

I always found it quite difficult to boot G3's off of a USB stick. Do you have a specific drive or brand that is particularly successful? I think a lot of flashdrives have issues with the v1.1 USB spec on the G3.

[@stonent]

He was using a Microcenter brand usb 3 drive. Might have better luck with a usb1.1 drive that's just big enough to hold rhe image.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

VLC was probably to expect too much from a machine of this vintage and with such dated specs but perhaps mpv would have worked? And with something like youtube-dl (yt-dlp) maybe you could even get it to play KZbin videos. Of course, you probably would be limited to videos in post stamp-sized resolutions such as 240p and 360p or, if lucky, 480p but it would still be a cool achievement nonetheless.

[@xerzy]

There's nothing too special about mpv. It's mostly using different libraries for the same thing. Machines pre-SIMD are simply too slow.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

@@xerzyI know but mpv is the direct descendant of mplayer and I recall using mplayer (and xine, to some extent) to watch videos and physical media successfully in machines of that era so I am inclined to believe that it would work here as well. Besides, there is little to no GUI on mpv and I believe that the reason that VLC failed there could be related to the lack of some toolkit library or something along these lines so there is a small chance that it could work although TBH I have near zero experience with PPC.

[@WildVoltorb]

​@@xerzy mpv is special ❤

[@blubaustin1]

@@xerzy what's odd I had the same machine back in the day. I ran ubuntu which dropped support for ppc so I switched to gentoo. I remember playing youtube videos in vlc on it b ack in the day. Problem was only certain file formats would work due to no hardware 3d acceleration, and well the cpu was pretty weak and did not like X formats.

[@alphaLONE]

Quite funny that those machines are now older than the first ever Macintosh was back when those were released.

[@beenine5557]

Wow. That just blew my mind. Maybe the next Action Retro episode should try the analogous feat: running MacOS 8 on a MacPlus.

[@TheCoolerFury]

FYI, the ftp command on openbsd also does double duty as a http file downloader, no wget needed ;).

[@calrogman]

It also handles local files. The progress bars shown while unpacking the sets during installation are drawn by an ftp | tar pipeline.

[@ZeroGDucks]

I'd like to see you put Open or Net BSD on an OldWorld Power Mac, like the 7500 or 9600 😁 It's been a project of mine whose instructions I still can't wrap my head around bahaha!

[@_..-.._..-.._]

I love my 350 slotloader. The slots are so easy to open up.

[@chriscalderon1337]

I love these kinds of videos. Now I want to try installing BSD on my MDD...

[@breadmoth6443]

wouldn't it have been easier to just burn a CD of openBSD and boot off of that to install? I'm surprised USB boot was even a thing so far back.

[@pianokeyjoe]

most indoobidably...

[@claudioguendelman]

I got Linux Ubuntu and a SSD on mine. Runing awesome.

[@beenine5557]

Thanks for mentioning that! I had seen the announcement from Debian that they were dropping support for 32-bit PowerPC years ago and presumed that meant only obsolete software would be available. However, I just checked Debian's NETINST image download and, sure enough, you can get the latest network install .iso for powerpc. Contrast that with 32-bit x86 whose cdimage has been archived and is no longer being updated.

[@EirikrTinkerTries]

Oh wait. Newer video than the other one I commented on… what?! The last one was running 2+ years old… but only has llvmpipe for 3D acceleration. Is there some version of Mesa that will work - even if it’s older and needs some love?

[@NickBouwhuis]

Hmm. I have a PPC Xserve lying around. Maybe I should try to install this on there x)

[@MaxOakland]

That would be awesome

[@rudybriskar5267]

Pretty cool! I just recently dove head first into the Apple ecosystem. My latest toy is a 2017 Macbook Pro running Sonoma 14.1.1 with 16/256.

[@geoffpool7476]

Awesome video! I'm going to try this on my Sage iMac G3 450.

[@icqme8586]

Worked for a school system in 2001 and installed a bunch of iMac G3's into classrooms. Wish I remember what the specs were. The single button mouse annoyed me but I liked the AIW form factor.

[@OldFordTaurus]

They were probably 400 or 500 mhz

[@therealjammit]

I have had some issues with laptop IDE drive to desktop IDE computer adapters before (and reverse adapters that allow a desktop drive to work in a laptop and some flash card to IDE adapters). Some of the pins that are ground are sometimes either not connected or the drive or computer are looking for unshorted pins to ground and the pins are shorted to ground. I've modified a few adapters to work, but you have to ohm out the desktop IDE connector and make sure the adapter also has the same ground pins used or disconnected. The adapters do follow IDE standards, but it seems some laptops don't correctly.

[@userperson5259]

ANYTHING to get more life and use out of these awesome old machines! I'm with ya! Eff yah!

[@shepherdosterompton]

I always use a hub to boot from usb on PPC Macs and it works every single time and sometimes it can even find it on the boot picker

[@beenine5557]

Is your hub powered by the USB bus or an external adapter?

[@shepherdosterompton]

@@beenine5557 powered by USB, in Open Firmware you just have to add the hub to the command when booting from USB

[@adampavelec857]

Dude. You should have booted from a floppy and installed over the internet! So much fun! Old timez!!!

[@beenine5557]

The iMacs were famous for not having buitin floppy drives, but they did have CD-ROMs.

[@okkrom]

3:55 ''Oh cool, I love some easy Linux install'' 4:44 ''Hmmm that doesnt look easy at all...looks like most linux experiences I've had''

[@tyrgoossens]

Manually editing X11 config files and Window Maker, I remember those days. I must say it doesn't feel particularly "modern" to me XD

[@EvanBoldt]

To put some scale on it I looked up some benchmarks. Double precision Whetstone seems like the most common for that era. This 700MHz cpu would do 0.32 MIPS. A Teensy microcontroller can do 67.1 MIPS. The Raspberry Pi 4 does 8176 MIPS. The Ryzen 5950X does 13,300 MIPS. So a current CPU is about 42,000 times faster in that specific benchmark.

[@adamwhite2364]

I'm mostly just shocked that there wasn't a G4 upgrade card shoved violently and dangerously into this thing while it was on its side

[@samwang1439]

Starting from about 11:00, I heard a mid-low frequency constant buzzing sound. Probably from the CRT? Is it possible to filter this noise out in future vids? Love it!

[@klingoncowboy4]

"Apple stopped supporting this with software updates before some of you were born". Make me feel old... I remember the iFruity in stores

[@philiphandforth4390]

I don't know if it applies but in my own experience my Imac G3 could run drives up to 128 gigabyte but it would be buggy and compatibility would be hit or miss at best. I've found 64 gigs to be the sweet spot as most 64 gig drives I've used worked without any issues at all. The issue with the usb might be voltage, it's only usb 1.1 if I recall which has a really low power output. I used a powered usb hub for everything except the usb drive to minimize load and that made usb boot a lot more stable for me.

[@jobalisk6649]

I got a couple of these sitting out back at work

[@megatronskneecap]

OpenBSD is designed to run on routers so i'm willing to bet it would run on a literal pregnancy test

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

That´s a myth. OpenBSD is a general purpose OS just as the others. For booting a pregnancy test, you will need NetBSD.

[@maf654321]

How actively developed is OpenBSD’s PPC port?

[@MarcosCodas]

The latest build, apparently, as seen in the video

[@Afsafs123]

I'm comvinced that the USB ports on these old iMacs are cursed. I booted up my Grape 233 yesterday after a couple years snd discovered that modern keyboards and mice only work every few boots, and event then, only after the OS is completely booted. No idea how i got things installed on the hard drive a couple years ago.

[@goclunker]

Sounds like bad caps

[@beenine5557]

Are you booting from USB? Try booting from CD instead.

[@GrahamBrownVirtualTours]

Have you ever managed to get xfce running in ppc?

[@GrahamBrownVirtualTours]

Also I have installed windowmaker but Dillo does not show as an "internet" application in the right click menu but your video appears to show an "internet" option under "applications" so if you can let me know how you managed that it would be awesome and very much appreciated! :)

[@der.Schtefan]

You saying "Installing is sooo easy!" and then cutting to 4 hours later, is like Lucy saying: "Vitameatavegamite is so tasty too!" and taking a spoon full of it.

[@UpLateGeek]

I always secretly thought this model of iMac looked cool because you could see the insides.

[@zacate903]

I had similar issues putting an SSD in mine, the IDE adapter needs to have a slave/master jumper on it and the afaik the internal ide controller only supports a max of 120gb

[@Plarndude]

My good friend moved out of State years ago and left a bunch of stuff at my house, including his iMac G3 PPC. It sits in the bathroom collecting dust because I just don't know what to do with it. Can I burn a CD to install OpenBSD?

[@beenine5557]

Yes and it will probably work better than the USB boot.

[@TSGarp]

The 256GB mSATA, the multiple usb tries, this was the same with my Powerbook G4 titaniums too. Still not sure why the G3/G4 lines are so finicky with this.

[@nticompass]

I know this video is about BeOS - I mean OpenBSD - or whatever, but can we talk about your Johnny the Homicidal Maniac poster?

[@basicforge]

Is there any way to add more 1GB RAM?

[@beenine5557]

I don't know about the 700MHz model, but the previous G3s often supported more RAM than Apple claimed. The rub was that you couldn't know what the actual maximum was without trying it.

[@KyleMahaney]

Did you have graphics acceleration working? On 7.4 I seem to be getting softpipes as my accelerator in neofetch.