Strictly speaking, the last Power Mac was the quad G5, which was a dual-CPU, dual-core 2.5GHz machine (and my daily driver: I bought it new in 2006, just shortly before the Intel transition was announced). Not only is it collectable from that standpoint, it's also a not unreasonably beefy machine even by current standards (and the beefiest you'll ever get that can run Classic). Probably for this reason they still fetch as much as a grand on the used market. Meanwhile, TenFourFox evolves. I got the last bugs out of JavaScript JIT type inference over Christmas, and there should be test builds up tonight for those here who are interested (see the TenFourFox development blog). I still think there is a lot of life in Power Macs. My two main desktop machines and my main laptop are all PowerPC (G5, iMac G4 and late iBook G4). I plan to get at least 10 years out of my quad, and I have a spare unit identically configured, just in case. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Never trust a computer you can't lift. -- Mac rollout, 24 January 1984 -----

Really, for my purposes all I need is a current web browser (heheheh). I'm pretty insulated against hardware failure and I keep cloned spares ready to go just in case. With 8GB of RAM, the quad runs Photoshop (7, because I hate product activation), Final Cut Express HD, TenFourFox, Office v.X (I have 2008, but v.X works just fine for my purposes), GarageBand and a smattering of Classic apps including QuarkXPress 4 quite nicely. I stuck some Caviar Black drives in it which yielded a minor but appreciated throughput increase, and I usually run the system in Reduced mode to save power and wear and tear (a convenient MenuExtra I found lets you flip to Automatic/Highest on the fly without a trip to System Preferences, so I can turn on turbo only when I need it). My next "computer" will probably be an ARM netbook of some kind anyway; I really don't need another desktop system since I have my own server room. As long as I can get an xterm and a basic browser, I can run everything else off the POWER6. But I'm doing fine on what I've got. The only thing I don't like is because of Mozilla rapid release, I spend way more time on TenFourFox than I'd like to. Classilla is getting neglected. That is super annoying. Another win for old "stupid" hardware. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Architecture is the art of how to waste space. -- Philip Johnson -----------

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Zane H. Healy wrote: You could always switch to SSDs, but it may cost more to get a SCSI SSD than a new computer would cost.... Clint

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Zane H. Healy wrote: Did you reload the OS after the Ethernet failed? An archive and install has fixed that very problem on a handful of Macs I've had that failure on. Stumbled on the fix by accident. Was cleaning up a princess leia makeup mirror G4 iMac that I'd switched to wireless years earlier due to the E-net failure. Plugged it into the network and magically the Software updates started loading. No airport configured. You might give it a try if you still have the box. Jim

On 27/12/11 8:11 PM, cctech at vax-11.org wrote: Why SCSI? G5 tower & Mac Pro are SATA. I put an Intel SSD in my G5. --Toby

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Zane H. Healy wrote: Don't know if it works on OSX, but on linux the hdparm utility lets you turn that off. The -B, -S and -Z switches are relevant. Alexey

At 5:56 PM -0800 12/27/11, Zane H. Healy wrote: I think the answer to the problem is in the CHUD tools for Developers. It's called SpindownHD.app and I'm not trying to find info on exactly how it works. The other solution is a 'cron job' (whatever replaced cron) that touches a file every few minutes. I like the idea of being able to turn this on just when I'm doing photo editing. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ |

At 6:44 PM -0800 12/27/11, Cameron Kaiser wrote: LOL!!! Yeah, that's what I meant. I have the same setting. That would explain why after coming back to my computer after having been away for an hour, Capture One responded immediately! :-) I just set them to sleep after 5 minutes idle, so I can finish verifying that it works how I think it does. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ |

On Dec 29, 2011 1:18 AM, "Toby Thain" <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: on. Is dual boot possible, and what distribution have you tried (I'm a Gentoo man)? Yes, dual-booting is perfectly possible. My Mac mini G4 triple-boots between OS X 10.4, 10.5 and an Amiga OS called MorphOS - and I used an Ubuntu 10.04 PPC boot CD to get it working. Gentoo is somewhat moribund note, AFAICT, but if you really like your Linux 1995 style then you might B4R able to find a build of Arch or something. Or a BSD. Me, I'd probably suggest Debian. But if I want to run Linux, I'd probably just use a PC, myself. More drivers, plugins and so on. A large part of the reason to use a Mac for me is Mac OS. - LP

On 29 December 2011 03:11, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I am curious; why not? I tried Gentoo myself. I spent about 3 days building a system which wouldn't boot as a result. But overall, I read all the notes and the (very detailed, if poorly-written) Handbook, and came away utterly unconvinced. I do not see any real benefit in compiling your own distro and the notes and FAQs and so on did not convince me. I don't believe that a few optimisation tweaks can make that much difference, frankly. It all seemed like a colossal amount of work, and wasted time, for a percent's benefit if you're lucky. The clincher for me, though, was that this ultimately-customisable, build-your-own distro didn't support the customisation I wanted. Specifically, that of the init system. I really don't like the System V init; I find it to me a maze of twisty little shell scripts, all alike. I wanted a BSD-style init, like Slackware. You can't. I asked on the fora and mailing lists. I got the ASCII equivalent of a blank stare. Most of the contributors didn't know there was a choice of init systems, or what an init was. Those that did, didn't see why one would want to change it. Those few that understood that there were differences said "but we've chosen the best one; deal with it." Which *completely* misses the point of a "completely-customisable" compile-your-own distro, if you can't make the one customisation you really want. I decided at this point that Gentoo was a complete waste of time and walked away. Nothing I've ever read has convinced me otherwise, frankly. Although I met a few smart people, in its time - 5-6Y or more ago - that could argue why it was a good thing, frankly, all the most professional Linux types I've met use Debian. A few corporate wage-slaves favour RHEL. Anything else seems to be just being different for the sake of it, which is not what I would choose if I were hiring a Linux sysadmin, personally. Desktops are slightly different, but not massively. If you like to play, Arch seems to be the modern choice. If you just want it to work, Ubuntu. If you want something more Free or with your own choice of desktop, Debian. If you want to be a corporate wage-slave, CentOS. Other choices, frankly, are either simple boosterism, like the overclockers building AMD PCs because they're AMD supporters, even though Intel comprehensively won the performance race 5Y or more ago and AMD will never come back again. Distro choice in the 2nd decade of the 21st century seems to me to be: Noob? Ubuntu. Expert? Server: Is someone else paying? Run RHEL. Otherwise, run Debian, unless you're after a toy not a tool. Desktop: Ubuntu, unless you're really seriously opposed, in which case, Debian. If you're not man enough for Debian (and I'm not), Xubuntu or Mint. Ahh, fair enough! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

I "hear" from my Power Mac friends who have jumped ship from OS X that MintPPC works best on the desktop, and CRUX PPC for servers. But, if I had a spare mini G4, I'd probably put MorphOS on it. I'm hoping they support the iBook G4s soon. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son, the uncle has a beer.

On Thu, 29 Dec 2011, Liam Proven wrote: I don't think he's complaining about the packaging tools, but the pace (and politics) of the Debian packaging process. Alexey

On 30 December 2011 01:09, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I really want to understand this. Could you give me any examples, at all? Part of me wants to say "a dependency is a dependency; if you need a library for something to work, then you need it, end of story" and point out that disk space, even now after the Thai floods, is about 7? pence per *gigabyte* and that you can fit an awful lot of OS into a gig of disk. If you installed every single package in the Debian repositories onto a single machine, the amount of disk space consumed would cost roughly the same as a can of Coca-cola. But by the same token, OK, I do sometimes get annoyed at packages bringing in stuff that I don't want, and unnecessary software does mean marginally increasing the attack surface of an OS, as well as a slight increase in complexity. But really, I regard this as a very trivial problem indeed, overall. Occasionally it is annoying that Ubuntu does not include the latest version of a program, although the problem is shrinking all the time - for instance it now keeps up with Mozilla's new rapid release schedule, which was for a while a real nuisance. But you only have to wait 6mth between releases, and on a server, I am typically /very/ conservative with my update schedule, in any case. I only want stable, well-tested software on my servers. The idea of *custom-compiled binaries* with system-specific optimisations that will almost certainly be subtly different from every other user's out there, thus offering a myriad of potential differences in behaviour or tiny incompatibilities with 3rd-party vendors' binaries, drivers, or whatever, on a server, gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. It is the /absolute *last* thing I'd want/ on a server - it is very, *very* undesirable indeed, from my POV, which is why I am, to say the least, curious as to why someone would see this as something they /wanted/! Gentoo's original argument was for performance. If a server is suffering from poor performance, I'd put some more RAM in it, not tweak the compiler switches and make new binaries! That is not merely the last thing I'd do, it would be a sackable offence for any server admin I was paying! I can, I suppose, believe that, although frankly, I prefer an approach that maybe installs some stuff you don't need but just gets you a working package with the minimum amount of mucking around. [*Recoils in shock*] /Fedora/?! On a /server/?! Seriously? It's a sort of periodic alpha release, it's not even meant to be stable! That seems very odd to me, but OK, as the free equivalent of RHEL, it makes a vague sort of sense. I do see it on webservers and things. I am not very familiar with modern RH-derived distros - I abandoned RPM with a song of joy as soon as Ubuntu came out. Suddenly here was an easy, quite accessible distro that delivered the powerful packaging system that all my egghead boffin Debian-running friends had been being superior about for nearly a decade. I never looked back and would need to be crow-barred back into using RPM these days. I do understand that it tends to dominate in the US and very US-dominated areas, though, and in the commercial paid-support sphere. If I was working as a Linux sysadmin, I expect I'd have to learn RHEL or Centos and use it. Happily, I'm not. Sometimes by whole months, yes. Can be a niggling irritation on a desktop; actively desirable on a server. Or Debian Testing. I've tried to address that. Again, could I ask for examples of what you mean? I actively want to understand this - I always want to understand more about why and how people use Linux and FOSS, along with other practices and habits and so on. I was typing on my phone, so was going for brevity. It might have been better to say apt-get than .deb. If I wanted the most popular, I'd be running Windows! No, it's not that, although 3rd-party support is an issue. No, it's more that I want something stable, conservative, highly consistent across different systems, that only changes gradually when it absolutely needs to. That to me seems the /reverse/ of Gentoo. I am running out of surfing time! I'll read that and come back. Again, I'd point at Windows or Mac OS X if you want easy. The reasons for Linux are stability, power, software, resources and support, ISTM. Customisability is very low on the list on a server. So long as one can remove stuff one doesn't want. Ubuntu came out 7Y ago - in October 2004 - and has turned the desktop distro world on its head. It is rapidly driving other desktop distros to extinction and several of the more interesting rival desktop distros are Ubuntu remixes. (E.g. Bodhi, the most significant Enlightenment-based distro in a long time. Mint, which is doing more with GNOME 3 than anyone. Xubuntu, a big booster for Xfce. Lubuntu, an interesting attempt at a modern distro for low-end kit. Even Puppy Linux, the lightest-weight desktop distro there is, has moved to an Ubuntu base. Damn Small Linux is dead, sadly.) It is the biggest thing to /ever/ happen to desktop/server Linux, has massively increased Linux adoption and use, and it came half way through your cited period of no change. Meanwhile Ubuntu Server is making headway, too, although it is technologically very conservative. I know people who prefer it to Debian for servers, although I admit, not many.) So, er, I have to disagree, markedly! Now this is not to say that I think Ubuntu is perfect - it's not - but your statement is demonstrably false, I think. You do know the #1 site for Gentoo advocacy, don't you? :?) http://funroll-loops.info/ ;?) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 30/12/11 8:24 AM, David Riley wrote: probably why I originally started using it, but I think the real benefit these days is comfigurability of options. It's nice to be able to specify (on a global or package level) what options I want to build with. For example, netatalk for the longest time did not have DHX2 on Debian/Ubuntu unless youanually downloaded the source RPM and built it with the crypto. In Gentoo, that sort of thing is generally in a USE flag. Yes. And the sophistication (and constraint system and solver) has improved noticeably over the years. I notice the FreeBSD ports system has a little of this flexibility too; to a Gentoo admin it sure felt more comfortable to set up than binary Linux. (I had the opportunity to compare directly last year, as my VPS provider unfortunately shunted me spend quite a while on my home server cleaning out old dependencies that had accumulated for a long time because I had been unaware of the magical incantations to do so (because their documentation is rather non-obvious). Having used Gentoo on servers and desktops, I agree that it *is* more difficult to administer on desktops. But that's what those other distributions are for ;-) --Toby

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 6:55 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Quite so. day to maintain a pile of RHEL or CentOS servers (physical and virtual). I bet on RedHat, professionally, starting with RH5.1, and that made me a lot of money (plus it got me to the South Pole). My most recent gig, however, is Ubuntu-Server-centric (there's some RHEL and CentOS still, but more Solaris than those two combined). My present position aside, I see many, many job postings here looking for RHEL and/or CentOS skills and a much smaller number of posting seeking Suse experience, and almost nothing else. I'm not trying to claim RedHat is better, just the most commonly sought skill-set for Linux admins in the States. I've had my share of frustration (especially with trying to use recent versions as a workstation OS and most especially on laptops), but I think back to how much "fun" we used to have trying to add hardware to monolithic 4BSD kernels that took 2-4 hours to recompile and how bad it was trying to port applications and games from a SYSV world into the BSD world, and modern Linux problems don't seem so hard anymore. I started with 4BSD on a 2MB VAX-11/750 and Ultrix 1.1 on a 3MB VAX-11/730. Lots of improvements since then, but unlike my compatriots who were fiddling with MS-DOS, the commands and languages and skills I learned 26 years ago are still relevant to my day-to-day job (though it's nice to be doing it on hardware that costs hundreds of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars - that's a handy consequence of Moore's Law). -ethan

On 30 December 2011 16:15, Jason McBrien <jbmcb1 at gmail.com> wrote: I'm not saying it's a /problem/ as such, but I found it fiddly, a lot of work and the benefits that I have heard about were performance-related and nothing I'd want myself. My tiny bit of experience with "emerge" did not impress or appeal to me, and I found "use" flags a poorly-documented mess of no perceptible benefit. I can see from comments here that there are non-performance-related benefits for some people, though. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 30/12/11 10:54 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote: Yes, that may be true, but says little about the relative sophistication of the systems (as I've been laboriously trying to show :) It says something about the lack of imagination and insecurity of hiring mentality that insists on hiring PHP devs when what they need are software engineers. Any decent sysadmin can move between systems fairly easily. That is an under-appreciated fact about Unix :) What next -- people will say programming and century-old math are related?! --Toby

NetBSD has gotten uncomfortably fat. My remaining NetBSD machines all run 1.6 with my own patches, and I've never heard of NetBSD or any *BSD other than OS X itself running well on a G5. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Are we not men? We are Klingons! -- Klingon-Devo Mix Masters, Inc. ---------