Arch PPC, a G4 and a Saturday

Question

I had some spare time Saturday. Well, actually, I had plenty of stuff
to do, I just did not want to. I was sitting at my desk thinking of
anything that I could be doing besides what I should be doing
A shiny box in the corner of my office caught me eye!
I have two Apple G4 machines, both are 450MHz (Don't be a hater!)
My oldest son has one that he plays around with. It has OSX on it.
The other one was sitting in the corner of my office here at home.
It had OSX on it also. But it was not being used at all.
Trying Arch PPC on the G4 had been a plan for a while. The time to try
it had come. It was placed on "the rack". The shiny G4 was going to be
a file server!
The install went very well, and quick. There were only two hangups.
If I had taken the time to read before installing, the first problem would not
have been a problem at all. It was the issue with OpenSSH requiring heimdal.
And heimdal being in extra and not in core.
The second problem was after the install. The G4 was rebooted and I
was greeted with a screen full of scrolling text.
DEFAULT CATCH, code=300 at %SRR0:...
There was more on the line that I do not remember. That line looped
forever. My official opinion was "that ain't right". A Google search told
me that it might be trying the wrong partition and I needed to boot into
OpenFirmware (OF) and make it manually boot the correct partition.
Getting in OF was a challenge. Googling for ways to get into it gave
plenty of hits. After many failed attempts, I finally got in and told it
what to boot (boot hd:3,yaboot) and Arch PPC was running!
I had read that running "ybin" would fix the booting error. When the
system was fully up, ybin was ran. Then the system was rebooted and it came up
the way it should!
Then OpenSSH, Samba, ProFTP, and lighttpd was installed.
The total time it took, from start to finish, was under 45 mins.
Remember the stuff that I was trying to avoid doing? There was still
time left to do those things. Not good   I needed to kill more time.
Why not add X and e17? Although neither of those would be
used much, if ever, on a file server. So what! I want to see how it
does with X running.
I installed X, firefox, thunar, terminal, x11vnc and e17.
I added 3 more HDs. Now there is a little over 1TB in the G4.
When everything was installed, startx.
The screenshot shows the CPU at 7%. That is not accurate. On average,
with X and e17 running, the CPU stays near 50%. X wont be used anyway.
The box will run headless. Without X running, the CPU stays at about 1%.
The G4 was placed in the location it will remain. Booted up (no X.)
Everything was tested, everything works.
All that added about 40 mins onto the time (e17 had to be compiled.)
And I still had plenty of time to mow the lawn

Answer 1

I'd buy that shirt!
Also: nicely done! I thought about installing Arch PPC on my iBook but then again, I'd miss Textmate. Maybe on a second partition ... later.
Last edited by mucknert (2008-05-13 11:56:45)