Hey guys,

I just impulse bought a Mac Mini G4 - the 1.50ghz with the 64mb Radeon card.

Anyway, I'm going to take it apart and upgrade the hard drive, RAM, replace the coin battery cell, and then plan to configure it for triple boot - OSX/MorphOS/Gentoo.

I also plan to do some fun experiments in each of the OSes. I'm considering blogging this, if people think it'd be useful, but don't want to invest the time if nobody cares. Let me know if you think this would be of interest.

Thanks!

Nice one in getting a 64mb Radeon mac mini - nice machines for Morphos. Good luck on your upgrades and yeah... I'd read your blog posts about it - go for it and have fun.

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Your blog will probably be more interesting to AmigaOS4 users who are curious about getting a cheap system to run MorphOS on, than it will be for long time MorphOS users that have been visiting MorphZone for several years, so make sure you also mention your blog on other forums, where the AmigaOS4 users hang out most of the time.

Yeah, the Mac Mini G4 was the first supported MorphOS Mac System and most people got these right away. Later on the "market" got more spread with PowerBooks or PowerMacs.

Now a G4 Cube on the other hand.... :) :)

Hi Debaser,

G4 Cube is compatible ?

> G4 Cube is compatible ?

Yes, it is, see http://www.morphos-team.net/hardware, but with limitations ("Lacks support for the bundled USB audio hardware.").

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From what I know it's "silently" compatible. MorphOS will run on it, but the network card is not supported, so you have to work offline (and cannot register the machine).

Ok thanks to you for your return

"Devs/Networks/SunGEM
[...]
Fixed network setup on PowerMac5,1 (Cube)"

Extract from http://www.morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.4

So, Cube's network hardware is also "silently" compatible

> Cube's network hardware is [...] compatible

What about Cube's USB audio hardware? Has it become compatible with MorphOS 3.10? (I know it's still stated to be incompatible on the MorphOS website, as mentioned above, but this may be an oversight.)

Haha looks like cube is more interesting than mini, so I’ll skip blogging in that case. :)

FWIW, I’ve got OS X 10.5.8 dual booting with MorphOS 3.10 so far. Gentoo installation is ongoing. Last night I found an updated stage3 tarball as well as updated kernel for the Mac mini g4 specifically, with more modern gcc (among other things). I changed the desktop profile and ran the emerge deep newuse world (not exact command, paraphrasing) and it’s been building overnight. We’ll see how it goes!

Quick update if anyone is interested -

Holy crap getting from 0 to 1 with gentoo took some effort, but now I have a fast booting and fast compiling (for a G4!) basic GNU/linux powerpc mac. Pretty cool.

Networking works, the kernel is rather new, nothing is broken, 'dmesg' doesn't throw any huge red flags. Kernel configuration was a pain, but so far so good. The hardest part was figuring out yaboot.

Now, onward to configure xorg!

Congrats! Yes, yaboot really is the source of endless pain..

In case anyone cares, I finally got xorg working. FINALLY. :D

I had some issues with the radeon framebuffer and somehow or another got a reliable desktop experience. This was tough...required some hard reboots. I also had to add a custom boot parameter in yaboot (can't remember off the top of my head). I believe it simply turned off KMS.

In any case, things are moving forward. I'm opting for a simple openbox desktop experience to keep things lightweight.

Once I get gentoo looking and feeling the way that I want, I'll try configuring grub2...because I'm a special kind of masochist, I suppose.

Gentoo has a lot of packages without the 'ppc' keyword that do build and function as expected on the ppc architecture. As I discover these, I'm filing bugs to get the keyword added.

Is anyone interested in running linux on their G4 Mac Mini? Right now, booted into a full desktop, I'm only consuming ~70mb of RAM. Very nice. :)

Hi esc,

would it be possible to use an MacMini with a "corrupt" gfx chip (some gfx glitches), install linux on it with no desktop just a terminal, setup a cross compiler and some other packages (samba, ssh) to use it remotely w/o monitor/keyboard/mouse as a cross building system?

Yep! Should be totally possible. You can just use fbdev, as far as I know. If you can boot a gentoo ppc livecd, you should be good to go.

@Igracki: Yes. Works very well via ssh or even VNC. Most of the time the graphics glitches only occur if you run X on the card - console only is no problem.

@esc: I would not do a Gentoo keyword request (link) for any package you don't find keyworded for ppc/ppc64, only for the ones you really run on your system. Getting packages into the architectures testing phase "~ppc" (link) is not a big problem most of the time. Getting and maintaining them into stable "ppc" status can be quite a maintainance burden for devs. But filing bugs if a package already in ~ppc or ppc does not build or fails some tests on your machine is always a good idea!

Also I am very interested in your grub2 efforts! yaboot has been giving me headaches for a long time...

Yeah, I noticed that the bugs I filed to get the 'ppc' keyword added were amended to add '~ppc' - this now makes total sense. FWIW I was filing bugs per the gentoo ppc wiki page, which suggests to do so if you can build and use a package that was untested on this arch, so...just trying to provide a bit of signal. :)

Thanks!

After several days of mucking around with use flags trying to get Firefox to build, I finally got it working. So now I have a fully fledged Linux desktop on my Mac mini. I just need to theme it and install things like decent fonts and icons. This has been very satisfying :)

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Stop with change the hard drive, I did with my first Mac Mini G4 I upgraded to SSD and the Mac Mini took the crazy because the Mac boot sometime doesn't recognize the hard disk, and I have change the drive to start the computer, the other upgrades like button cell and RAM work fine, but he hard disk not.

So you bought a crappy SSD....

Had 2 MacMini over the time, both had an SSD, never had such problems.

Yeah, my hard drive is fine, survived multiple reboots among three operating systems.