What To Do With an Old G5 Tower? 417
lunatic1969 writes "I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around. My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?"
PPC Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu 9.04 (Score:2, Informative)
Audio Workstation/Recording Studio (Score:5, Informative)
If you have the model with the PCI-X, rather than the PCI Express bus, then probably the optimum usage is putting it in a recording studio. There are some great rack-mount multi-channel (like 10 in, 10 out) audio interfaces by the likes of M-Audio which use the PCI bus, and have never been updated for PCI Express compatibility, so they won't work in a Mac Pro.
The G5 has plenty of performance for audio work, and plenty of space for internal hard drives or RAID. This would really be the optimum niche for such a machine. For other purposes (file server etc), it sucks too much power and takes up too much space for its usefulness. But for audio work with dedicated hardware, it's perfect.
Re:G5s are power hogs (Score:5, Informative)
That Is The Correct Answer.
You can get a nettop for about $200 that will have as much storage. It will be fast enough and be x86 so give you a wide choice of distros and with the correct choice of GPU will do hardware accelerated 1080p. Finally it will be a fraction of the size and consume 20 watts.
You're doing no-one other than your power company a favor by resurrecting the G5 tower.
Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Debian or Recycle it (Score:4, Informative)
You can rather easily run Debian on the thing with support for all of the non-architecture specific packages that you'd find on an equivalent machine running another architecture; I had quite a few of them around at one point.
That said, you really should strongly consider not running the machine unless you have a very specific use for it; there are many lower powered machines which won't waste as much eneergy and will provide equivalent functionality.
Media Center/File Server (Score:3, Informative)
I still have Leopard on it, but that's just because it was the last OS I used before I re-purposed it. I could stick ubuntu on it later on, but there's nothing pressing me to do so just yet (I will eventually, I suspect.) It still sits in the cubbyhole of my super-cheap computer desk in my office, and I use the front USB port if I ever need to reboot it or anything (it's got an insane uptime...) heh. I use screen sharing in OSX to connect to it using my Mini or MBP. It serves up itunes to all my Macs (and mp3s/etc to my PS3/360)without any fuss or overly spastic noise.
Re:retire it (Score:5, Informative)
Since the G5 was designed for performance, it's not exactly a great file server chip though. But it's far from being a "space heater" as you say -- mine gets used every work day. As others have pointed out, either put linux on it, or put an older version of OS X on it. I still have 10.4 on mine because it was the last OS Apple produced that was streamlined for the PPC. However, now that Apple has stopped supporting it, I'll have to break down and put 10.5 on it. On other older machines though I have installed both pbbuttons and gtkpbbuttons which support a lot of of the media keys on the keyboard pretty well.
Two options... (Score:3, Informative)
If it's a run-of-the-mill air-cooled model, just sell it. I just sold mine for $200 direct to someone (who I found on here, actually), but on eBay they were going for around $250 when I looked. Put the money toward buying/building a smaller, less power-hungry box if you're looking for something to do server duty. The person who pays your electric bill will thank you.
If, on the other hand, it's one of the liquid-cooled models, keep it and definitely use it for something suggested in this discussion, but make sure you keep good backups-- Eventually it will develop a catastrophic coolant leak which will destroy it, and if you take it to an Apple Store they might just give you a free Mac Pro. [google.com]
~Philly
OpenBSD (Score:1, Informative)
OpenBSD will run fine on it, as will Debian.
Perfectly usable and powerful with OS X (Score:4, Informative)
We're using a G5 PowerPC tower to run all functions, including 24/7 streaming, of an internet radio station. Tons of modern software for it (including being able to live-stream after a compression and other audio manipulation chain)... I love Linux and use it on many machines for many purposes, but there's no reason to ditch OS X just because the machine is aging.
A file server? Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously? Okay. The OS that probably works best with this machine is --- drum roll -- OS X.
Without hardly thinking about it it'll serve files via AFP and SMB.
Google will tell you how to enable the NFS server on it. (That's right, you don't need OS X Server.)
Streaming video? If there's open source software for Linux to do this, there's a pretty good chance it'll build on OS X too.
Best Buy Trade In Program (Score:4, Informative)
Re:retire it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Folding@Home (Score:4, Informative)
Re:yellow dog linux still around? (Score:1, Informative)
I bought a drive *instead* of a file server. I just got a nice external case with esata and a huge fast drive. It's way faster than networking, and it's very easy to move around.
I'm not wasting power, making heat, or maintaining another system as a file server, nor running network cables or messing with wireless anywhere I might need it. Does that make me a cretin? I don't really think so.
Re:retire it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:retire it (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, I was going to post the same thing. I was using one as a file server until recently, when it occurred to me to check how much power it was consuming. Christ! For the cost of running that beast a few months, I could have just bought a cheap NAS.
Basically, yah. It's useless, sell it to some sucker, buy a cheap NAS, and move on with your life.
Re:retire it (Score:4, Informative)
On the core 2 duo, it takes about 10 minutes for a 3-day run, on the G4 it takes about 3.5 minutes.
Brett
Re:Ubuntu 9.04 (Score:3, Informative)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.04/release/ [ubuntu.com]
Lucid as well.
Ubuntu 10.04 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ubuntu 10.04 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Old Games (Score:3, Informative)
Sell it to... (Score:3, Informative)
...a user on Al'Kabor.
http://eqmac.com/forums/index.php [eqmac.com]
Creative studio (Score:3, Informative)
You could simply use it as a desktop. Linux has grown leaps and leaps and leaps forward and in many ways ahead of the Mac as a desktop, so read on.
KDE SC 4.5 (about to be released in a few days/weeks) is leaps ahead of the Mac OS X 10.5 GUI. The only catch is that it is not minimalistic. If you want minimalism you have to pick Gnome with Gnome DO and set it to act like a docky. Put a Mac OS X wallpaper in place and install a Mac OS X theme. However KDE has focussed on more minimalism since KDE4 without sacrificing features.
There is a KDE application for video editing that is unparalleled: Kdenlive: http://www.kdenlive.org/ [kdenlive.org]
It slaughters Sony Vegas in functionality and is free of charge too. It may not be stable enough yet (version 0.7) so it might be a little bit of a bumpy ride at first.
There is also a kick-ass music management application: AmaroK: http://amarok.kde.org/ [kde.org]
It is compatible with iPods that are not of the latest generation (USB encryption crap)
KDE SC's default webbrowser is Konqueror, which, since KDE SC 4.5 also has WebKit support.
Google's Chrome is now also runnable on Linux.
If you don't like the Google privacy stuff than search for the Iron browser (they took the Chrome's source code and stripped it from any call home functionality)
For managing photo's, use DigiKam: http://www.digikam.org/ [digikam.org]
Personal information management: KDE PIM
For personal finance: http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html [sourceforge.net]
Office work isn't Linux' best aspect, so you could install OpenOffice.org. It is however the best Office Suit available for the PPC. It doesn't look all that good if your distro of choice hasn't supplied their own KDE4 integration into it.
Now there are a lot of distributions, so what should you pick?
The best and most stable KDE4 distro I have ever tried is Fedora. The default download option is with Gnone so search for a PPC KDE version. Because Fedora core is not using anything that is even remotely patented, you have to go to the RPMFusion website to add Adobe's Flash, MP3 and QuickTime codecs and whatnot: http://rpmfusion.org/RPM%20Fusion [rpmfusion.org]
You can see pick your download here: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/12/ [fedoraproject.org]
The Problem I am seeing here is that the current version of Fedora is 13 and the latest PPC64 builds are for Fedora 12. This leads to a little outdated software (1 year).
Re:yellow dog linux still around? (Score:4, Informative)
It's about right. From Apple's docs: [apple.com] idle 120W, max 420W for the single-processor 1.6GHz version, idle 140W, max 604W for the dual-processor 2GHz version. The old G5s were power guzzlers. Each CPU could use 100W by itself. They were the reason that Apple laptops were so slow for so long: IBM couldn't produce a decent low-power chip. Even the 'low power' FX variant used up to around 50W - there was no way Apple could fit that in a laptop. Remember that these machines come from the same era as the Prescott P4s, which peaked at 120W per CPU. Two CPUs, a load of support chips, RAM, multiple drives, and so on all added up.
Some of the G5s were water cooled, and all of them came with an impressive case design to maximise air flow.
Re:retire it (Score:3, Informative)
Well, it depends on the model and how much you load it and how many cards you have installed.
If it's a Single-1.8GHz 2004 model, it'll use 120W idle, 160W max and 552W fully-loaded max.
If it's a Dual-2.5GHz 2004 model, it'll use 120W idle, 406W max and 604W fully-loaded max.
If it's a Dual-2.3GHz 2005 model, it'll use 165W idle, 450W max.
If it's a Quad-2.5GHz 2005 model, it'll use 185W idle, 550W max.
The PSU itself is rated 600W and the fully-loaded means the most power-hungry pci-cards imaginable installed in all slots.
The performance per watt is comparable to other performance-oriented machines of the era; Athlon64's / Opterons and Intel P4's / Xeons.
Here are some benchmark scores to compare with other macs: http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/ [primatelabs.ca]
A PowerMac G5 could be perfectly fine as a desktop machine running OSX 10.4, 10.5 or a linux distro. The power consumption isn't such a big issue, if the machine is put into sleep mode or shut down when not used.
Re:ubuntu? or just rsync? (Score:3, Informative)
Or you can develop your code on a modern machine (where compile times are much faster) and run it with an account limited to using 1% of the CPU. Or if you really want a slow machine, you can get something cheap based on an AMD Geode or ARM core, and use under 10W for the entire system.
Generally, though, testing your code on old machines makes you optimise for the wrong thing. On a modern machine, you can often get a large performance increase at the cost of a few MB of RAM. On a 486, that means that you're using all of your RAM, so the swapping makes the code slow. On a modern laptop, you're using 1% of your RAM for a 2 or more times speed boost. On a modern machine, offloading work to the GPU can make things faster and use less power. The same with tweaking SSE routines. With a 486, you won't be able to do either.
Re:Three options... (Score:3, Informative)
The haters are out this morning:
"... Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL,""
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml [arlo.net] :-)
RISC blows CISC away: [skip or walk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing#RISC_design_philosophy [wikipedia.org]
- so much so, that they still bolt it on CISC [with some success]
[Don't bother with the subheading "Diminishing benefits", it's BS, look at IBM's POWER]
RISC vs. CISC:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2000-01/risc/risccisc/ [stanford.edu]
Our G5 x2 2.5 is soon to be a companion to our Xserve x2 1.33 [redundant DNS].
Just add:
Swift Data 200:
http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2490 [transintl.com]
Inside your Power Mac G5:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1305 [apple.com]
"catastrophic coolant leak":
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair_p1.html [xlr8yourmac.com]