Here's to the PowerPC ones

Here's to the PowerPC ones.  The misfits. The rebels.  The troublemakers.  The round pegs in the square holes.  The ones who see things differently.

That is the perfect motto for this blog. Yes. Another blog covering the PowerPC architecture and Apple's almost near vintage (at least in the mind's of some) PowerPC line of computers.  This blog is primarily focused at helping other users out there of PowerPC hardware make the best out of their aging machines and hopefully have fun doing so along the way.

I think it might be beneficial to describe the PowerPC hardware I currently own and utilize on a daily basis.  My favorite device and daily driver is my recently restored 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook (Model #A1138). I only paid $25 for it with the shipping included.  It's rocking the maximum 2 GB of RAM, a replacement OWC Mercury DVD/CD drive, a brand new genuine Apple replacement battery and power adapter, new keyboard with a working backlight, new lid hinge lock  (what a pain to get that put back into place), and a replacement heat sink with a fresh coat of thermal paste. And last but not least, it has a 120 GB OWC Mecury Legacy Pro SSD.  The SSD helps the whole thing run a lot quieter and just a little bit cooler.  When I ran the last PowerPC compatible version of GeekBench on it, it came back with a score of 935, while the average is 843.

The nice thing about the OWC SSDs is that they don't require TRIM support as their drives have there own drive maintenance built in to the actual drive.  See here for a bit more information.

Not only that, but I have it set up for a triple boot between OS X Leopard, Debian Wheezy, and Lubuntu 13.10.  Seems like over kill, but it allows me to dabble in all sorts of interesting things.  Kudos to PowerPC luddite Dan for helping me properly partition and install Linux.

Whew.  That went a little longer than I anticipated, but so I'll cover the other devices in a future post.

Anyways, I will be posting guides and information regarding different things I do on each of my machines.  My guess is a lot of it will be Linux related, but that's a good thing as these machines do quite well on certain distros and are still officially supported by a handful of them (including Debian).  I've learned a great deal since I started to run Linux on these machines, so I hope to share that same knowledge and experiences with others.

Some of the posts will center around doing development in Linux, so feel free to skip over those if you aren't much into development.

Lastly, I'll cover hardware upgrades and repairs if I happen to run into any as they are sure to come up with such old hardware. :(

If you have any suggestions about something you would like to be covered in detail about anything PowerPC related, please post them in the comments below or shoot me an email at brockwittrock at gmail dot com.