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OK here's the deal, I might be very close to winning a deal on a used PowerPC Mac mini, for less than half the price of a new one, and I wanna throw one of the BSDs on there, and if it doesn't work right, I can always throw GNU/Linux on there, but I wanna try out a BSD first, but is anyone in here aware of which of the three big BSDs have the best PPC support? I favor FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but I'm open to give NetBSD a whirl if it has better support for the hardware.

openbsd. when I installed freebsd on my g4 tower, half the device didn't work, and netbsd was a pain to install. openbsd definitely.

Tsuroerusu wrote:OK here's the deal, I might be very close to winning a deal on a used PowerPC Mac mini, for less than half the price of a new one, and I wanna throw one of the BSDs on there, and if it doesn't work right, I can always throw GNU/Linux on there, but I wanna try out a BSD first, but is anyone in here aware of which of the three big BSDs have the best PPC support? I favor FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but I'm open to give NetBSD a whirl if it has better support for the hardware.

NetBSD has the best platform support hands down. In fact, any PPC support the other BSD's have come from borrowed code of NetBSD.

OS X. It's already on there.

I hear Linc praising all the time how OS X is more BSD than BSD!

Linc wrote:NetBSD has the best platform support hands down. In fact, any PPC support the other BSD's have come from borrowed code of NetBSD.

Well, as I said I'm open to try NetBSD, so I think it's likely that I will do that

dann wrote:OS X. It's already on there.

I hear Linc praising all the time how OS X is more BSD than BSD!

LOL, I don't wanna use OS X, I don't wanna use a proprietary operating system!
And also, just to step into Linc's role of "Mr. Lightweight desktop" (Thanks to Pat. for that title), OS X is a resource hog beyond morality.

By the way, believe me, I'm not only gonna throw OS X off the machine, I'm gonna take my time to torture it nicely!
For example: Put a LiveCD Linux in and delete system files, and at the same time corrupt the file system and a little stuff like that, and then finally I'm gonna give it a zero fill.

dann wrote:OS X. It's already on there.

I hear Linc praising all the time how OS X is more BSD than BSD!

I was gonna say that. I'm glad you beat me to it.

OK, I just got a deal on a Mac mini, oh man time to whip out the torture tools and kill OS X nice and slowly!

Are any of you guys aware of where the kernel files are located in OS X? And can I use the dd command to say write zeros to the middle of the drive or whatever sector I could specify?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 180&q=macs
oh, wait, you wanted to be able to use the hardware afterwards? hmmm....

I like OS X, myself. Besides, BSD and Linux on PPC is pretty far behind x86 in terms of multimedia/hardware support.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I like OS X, myself. Besides, BSD and Linux on PPC is pretty far behind x86 in terms of multimedia/hardware support.

Well, that's not a problem, because that's not what I'm going to be using this sucker for. I'm not buying it because of the PPC chip, I'm buying it because of the size, and power usage. I'm just gonna have it sitting in the corner doing BitTorrent and stuff like that, if I am ever to buy a new desktop machine for myself, I'd go with Opteron, those are even good for gaming if I wanted to play Quake 4 for instace. On some Opteron-based workstation motherboards, you get a hell of a lot of features, IDE, SATA, SCSI.... and even NVIDIA's SLi, and all kinds of great stuff like PCI-X for massive arrays of drives, and room for like 16 GB of RAM..... I don't see why PPC would be so much better than an Opteron in this case, especially with the independant benchmarks, and real world performance that I'm hearing about on Apple's new Intel machines, I would say that Intel is beating the current PPC stuff.