SOFTWARE RECOMMENDATIONS

[rollcat]

I had a peek at your G4 shenanigans, and it sounds like a pretty nice setup, for sure! How well does it drive that monitor? I've found the OS getting sort of micro-stuttery and not very responsive if you drive really high resolutions. At least when I ran dual 1080p monitors on my G5 Powermac I had that issue. Could be GPU-specific though I suppose.

I can run it dual-head 1280x854 + 1920x1080, or mirrored 1280x854 + 1600x1900 (upscaled and blurry, yuck). It won't let me turn off the internal LCD at all, unfortunately. In dual-head the GUI is indeed less responsive, but I find that overall the system is 10x more swap-bound, especially with just a couple tabs open. I'm contemplating going the IDE->CF route for faster swap, and/or maxing the RAM at 1GB, but I feel that this would just defeat the spirit of the challenge. Perhaps the ultimate solution is to finally spend less time browsing the Internet xD

Also, no matter how much it swaps/stutters, iTunes keeps playing smoothly. The same can't be said of Music.app on M1... ;<

For easy installation of quite a bunch of PPC software you can install PPCAppstore and pick stuff from there.

There is a re-spin of TenfourFox called InterwebPPC that's at least a little newer, and the most recent PPC browser afaik.

Nice, I'll give both a try!

[headcrash]

I see! Sadly I don't believe they had implemented the external monitor support the later Intel machines have. Where you can put the computer to sleep, plug in an external monitor and wake it again. It then fully disables the onboard display and redirects all GPU performance to that.
It's easy to forget they're pretty ancient systems at this point though, hehe!
iTunes does perform extremely well, yes. I've never had it misbehave once.
My Powerbook had severe stuttering problems, which turned out to be the OS attempting to swap with a dying hard drive. I then replaced it with an mSATA-IDE adapter, so it's now got a modern SSD in it. It made such a big difference! One thing you have to bear in mind on the Powerbooks though is that if you plug a drive into it that it can't read the temperature from, it will run the CPU fan at full speed all the time. I've had good results with SSDs from Samsung for these reasons.

No problem! I've done quite a lot of software digging for my G5, so I might plug that in sometime during the week and throw together a folder full of software for you.

[rollcat]

Some updates on what I got to work ^^

Modern LibreSSL & OpenSSH can be compiled without any issues (although it takes a while, I probably should've timed it).

First, get the latest release tarballs from https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/ & https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/ (I've tested 3.9.2 & 9.8p1 respectively). I'm putting all third-party sources in ~/build and compiled these like so:

Code: Select all

cd ~/build
tar xf ~/Downloads/libressl-3.9.2.tar.gz
cd libressl-3.9.2
nice ./configure && nice make -j2
sudo make install

Code: Select all

cd ~/build
tar xf ~/Downloads/openssh-9.8p1.tar.gz
cd openssh-9.8p1
nice ./configure --with-ssl-dir=/usr/local && nice make -j2
sudo make install

Notes: OpenSSH's configure script needs to be told to use the modern LibreSSL, otherwise it picks up the ancient stock OpenSSL; also $PATH needs to be adjusted to put /usr/local/bin first.

I'm throwing in a -j2 even though the machine has only one CPU core, since not all compilation steps are strictly CPU-bound (I saw brief dips on the CPU usage graph).

I can now finally connect back to my M1 Mac, to pull any extra files (I'm seriously getting sick of the 5 CDs I've ripped xD), make backups, run software that can't be easily ported to PPC (most notably: anything in Go), etcetera. I think what would be very cool would be to make a tarball with the entire contents of /usr/local (sans ssh_host_*_key haha), maybe even update it occasionally (patches, more software e.g. git, python2.7, modern curl, whatever), for anyone interested. I'm definitely not up for recreating brew or nix from scratch tho xD

Also: mad respect for the OpenBSD developers, who maintain mainline releases of their software, that seem to "Just Work™" even on ancient and exotic hardware/systems. There's of course OpenBSD/macppc but I totally did not expect this to work so smoothly on stock OSX 10.5.8!

I've done quite a lot of software digging for my G5, so I might plug that in sometime during the week and throw together a folder full of software for you.

That would be awesome.

[mio]

OS: Void Linux

The following are CLI/TUI applications. Some may not be available in the repos, but are generally not difficult to build from source.

* File browsers: vifm
* Image viewers: chafa, timg
* Music players: cmus, mocp
* Web browsers: amfora (gemini), offpunk (gemini), w3m (https, gopher)
* Email clients: alpine, neomutt

* RSS readers: snownews, newsboat (comes with podboat to cue podcast downloads)
* ASCII and ANSI art editors: aewan, draw, durdraw


Untested gemini browsers: clagrange (terminal version of Lagrange), Geopard (GUI application)

[thedorkweb]

In the interests of making things a little less Unix-centric, some Amiga recommendations:

* File browsers: Directory Opus 4 (if you have 2Mb and an 020+) else Dirwork
* Image viewers: Multiview + Datatypes == or Mothra and AdPro on Workbench 1.x
* PDF: RNOpdf
* Music players: Hippoplayer, Delitracker, AmigaAMP, IMP (which is amazing on networked Amigas)
* Movie players: AGABlaster, Riva, ffplay
* Web browsers: IBrowse, AmiGemini, Amifox, NetSurf
* Email clients: SimpleMail, YAM
* RSS readers: IvoRSS, AmRSS, Amipodder
* ASCII and ANSI art editors: AnsiDraw
* Text Editors: CygnusED
* IRC: AmIRC, Wookiechat
* FTP: AmiTradeCenter (ATC)
* Backup: ABackup

[mavica]

mavica's windows 98 repository

[mccd]

OS: Freebsd

Some recommendations that I didn't see on the list:

* File browsers: Zoxide + cli
* Image viewers: imv
* Email client: aerc + isync
* Text Editors: mg (minimal emacs editor), vis or vim