Unix on System 7 era Macs - experiences / recommendations?



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Author	Unix on System 7 era Macs - experiences / recommendations? (Read 242336 times)
wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #15 on: September 10, 2025, 18:28 I would be interested in such endeavors, but probably on newer hardware than your targets. I have a very nicely tricked out Gigabit Ethernet dual g4 PowerMac, that sits idle and Unix seems like it would make a good system to exploit all that it has. I seem to recall that early on with OS X that Apple released a BSD variant based on the Darwin kernel. I seem to recall it being an iso, but I might be faulty there. Anyway I thought it might be a real hoot to set it up install OpenStep or CDE and see what could you could get done. (I wonder if Apple's Rhapsody runs on it?) I used Linux for several years, but as I came back to Mac, I found my interest in Linux waning and I moved toward BSD. I now have FreeBSD installed on a ThinkPad T580, and a newer Lenovo AIO.

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #16 on: September 10, 2025, 20:12 Don't bother trying to install fully blown Unix/Linux on such machines, not unless you got access to original vintage install media (like e.g. Apple's U/X). The internet repos out there that claim to still be hosting such files are so badly maintained (if at all), that you more likely end up bricking your system than getting anything "usable" out of the exercise. I found it more suitable to use MacShell, MacUnix and MacMint - incredibly compact Unix emulators for 68k - under MacOS. They lack networking and X11, but are as close to a complete vintage Unix system as you can get in every other regard.

snes1423 256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina	Reply #17 on: September 10, 2025, 20:17 I find it funny that you can find 25 year old lost shareware for windows 98 but somehow RPMs for YDL Linux are not avaible anywhere especially for PPC

lauland 512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!	Reply #18 on: September 10, 2025, 20:30 68040: I would tend to agree with you...to a certain extent. Unless you know what you are doing, or want to learn, or are willing to make mistakes and erase your entire hard drive, probably multiple times, this is not for the faint hearted. What is "out there" varies greatly in quality, but you can get a lot of millage out of using older versions. Especially on old hardware, which is what we're talking about. For example, anyone even thinking of trying to get a linux from the 2010's (or, perish, 2020's) to run on a powerpc is in for a world of hurt, and even if it did run, it would run badly just because modern os's are so big and hungry. The only recent powerpc linux distro with hope of running on older hardware is debian. The various BSDs are surprisingly good about having very modern releases with support for very old hardware. Anyone trying to run any of the odd linux powerpc versions I'd heard of, like Adelie or Phoenix or Chimera, or even the more mainstream but still obscure like Mint or Gentoo, I wish them luck, but seeing them having such trouble with video and more in the various forums out there, I wonder what they expected. Run Debian or an old ubuntu and you will have a far better time. ---- snes, you are exactly right about that! I have a boxed purchased version of YDL 2.3 that I used quite a bit, but at some point I lost one of the disks. (probably stuck in an old optical drive, maybe one that died and I threw out). I can't for the life of me find it anywhere out there to download a replacement. I can find some YDL's but not the one I used so much.
Last Edit: September 10, 2025, 20:33 by lauland
lauland 512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!	Reply #19 on: September 10, 2025, 20:30 Apple DID release a "Darwin" distro completely for free. It was basically just MacOS X, but ONLY the open source parts, which included all the BSD layer, and the Apple Kernel, which for a while was completely open source. The problem was the gui, originally it didn't come with one, but later did come with a version of X11. It could run MacOS X command line binaries, but didn't come with the Cocoa or Carbon frameworks. It wasn't terribly useful, as anyone that had a mac could easily get the full MacOS X, as back then, Apple wasn't too concerned with piracy of the OS. If you had a mac that could run MacOS X, it was in their interest that you did so, as they wanted everyone to move off of MacOS 9. The very earliest of these was based on MacOS X Server 1.0 aka Rhapsody, but the later ones tracked MacOS X 10.1 at least. They probably gave up around the time of 10.2. FYI you can't run OpenStep or Rhapsody "on" anything other than their own kernels, they are entire OS's. CDE was a gui for unix, similar to Gnome or KDE, and ran on top of X11, so it can be run anywhere you have that. ---- Your G4 will run Linux and all the BSD's quite well, I think. I have tried various ubuntu's and currently have debian on an ibook g4, which is my main powerpc linux machine. It also has morphos and MacOS X on it, which was a pain to get all of them happily together...partitioning was the hard with morphos being the worst. (Install it first, leaving space for the others, etc). ---- With most unix versions there are two key parts. The first is the "userland" which is all the commands and the gui, and those, for the most part are compatible between different "distros" or even different versions, for example mklinux and standard powerpc linux. (But this depends GREATLY on the libraries they may use). The different BSDs can, to one extent or the other run each other's binaries...usually... Some BSD's can run Linux binaries also, but this can be hit and miss. The other part part is the booter and kernel, and those are more machine specific. So, for example, the kernel from my ibook g4 may or may not have support and drivers for "old world" machines like the 7600, and definitely not nubus machines like the 6100. The booter is radically different from "old" and "new" world. The newer distros will tend to drop support for older machines. So, for example, there's a good chance my ibook g4 could run binaries meant for mklinux on my 6100...I would probably have to copy over older versions of libraries from the 6100. But compatibility gets lost as time progresses, and sometimes older libraries will no longer run on newer kernels, etc. The opposite is probably NOT the case. The newer libs from the ibook are less likely to run on the creaky ancient mklinux kernel. ---- Trivia: Over the years the "userland" of Darwin aka MacOS X has varied quite a bit. Originally OpenStep used parts of the BSD kernel, but many GNU commands, a real mutt of a hybrid, so Rhapsody was exactly the same. Apple preferred the BSD license to the GNU one, so at one point MacOS X was a lot like FreeBSD and used more and more of its commands. They also flirted with making linux people more at home, so would include linux style commands in addition, or where BSD didn't have an equivalent. As apple grew less fond of open source, they started to move away from ANY other os, and went their own way. They would use much more obscure versions of commands, or offshoots, etc etc etc. Almost always to avoid licensing and having to release the source...IMHO. This is most easily seen in the default shell. Rhapsody and the first versions of MacOS X used csh, like BSD. Then they moved to bash, which is the linux standard. These days we are saddled with zsh...for...some...reason?!?

wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #20 on: September 11, 2025, 00:25 Quote from: “Lauland” FYI you can't run OpenStep or Rhapsody "on" anything other than their own kernels, they are entire OS's. OpenStep is an API specification. It is akin to QT and Motif and like QT and Motif it is platform independent. OpenStep, QT and Motif are the tool kits used to create the UI. OPENSTEP (all caps) is the NeXT implementation of that specification. I suppose to further muddy the waters the Next computer’s OS was called NeXTStep. Apple modified OpenStep and called it Cocoa. Very strangely early iterations of OpenStep were also ported to Windows. The Mac OS X’s dock is NeXTStep’s dock, using Cocoa rather than OPENSTEP to create its look and functionality. GNUStep is I guess the open source variant of OpenStep which can be installed on BSD, Linux and probably could be ported to other OSes. If you go to install TextEdit on Linux, you find that it will bring in the whole GNUStep package in the same way that installing Krita brings in QT. GhostBSD which is derived from FreeBSD has a community edition using GNUStep.

lauland 512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!	Reply #21 on: September 11, 2025, 15:52 @wove You are 100% correct with everything you just said! I didn't want to muddy the water, as I've been writing far too much lately, spouting too much purported wisdom from my soapbox! The only thing I objected to was when you wondered if you could run OpenStep on the odd Apple Darwin release. Of course you can, and it was called Cocoa! You could copy the parts of MacOS X that were missing in the open source Darwin onto it and you'd end up with a mutant MacOS X! (But here I go again...) ...or...what some people suggested at the time, but never got around to, was port a copy of GnuStep to it. That would, in theory, give you a completely open source sorta MacOS X-ish thing. The main problem is GnuStep didn't take off, and lagged many of the radical changes Apple introduced as OpenStep evolved. So any compatibility between GnuStep and Cocoa is extremely bad when I looked into it in depth. I thought it'd be an awesome way to port MacOS X apps to Linux with GnuStep, but even doing "Hello World" returned very disappointing results. My 2 cents: One of the main reasons GnuStep didn't take off is you needed to learn a completely new language, Objective C, which can be used without any 'Step at all. That is why I never got into Cocoa personally, but stuck with Carbon. I didn't want to waste brain space learning a language tied just to one OS. This is the same reason I'm not terribly excited about Swift, but have stuck mainly to C/C++, which is pretty much as universal a language as we have. The Windows implementation of OpenStep is a very interesting monster and Apple could have do some amazing things with it. It comes with a complete development environment extremely close to what came with Rhapsody. They could have kept it in parity with MacOS X's Cocoa, but that didn't happen. During the Rhapsody time, Apple talked about "boxes", so Carbon was Blue and Cocoa was Yellow, so a lot of people were excited about a "Yellow box for Windows", and at first Apple stated that would be a product. But when MacOS X took off on Macs, Macs alone were in such a precarious state that apple just wanted to get everyone off MacOS 9, so they quickly abandoned it. Usually "OpenStep" was released as an entire OS, and there were ports of it to Sparc (and other even more obscure) architectures, which Europa has gotten running to a point. In a lot of ways Rhapsody is "OpenStep for PPC" with a mac-ish gui, and not much more than that...well, if you ignore what would evolve into Classic, confusingly ALSO called the "Blue Box". Anyway, I'll get off my soap box, as if you guys are interested in more ancient OpenStep/Cocoa/GnuStep history, you can obviously find loads of it out there, and don't need me to rant about it.
Last Edit: September 11, 2025, 15:58 by lauland
ShinobiKenobi 256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan	Reply #22 on: September 15, 2025, 18:40 @wove I also have that same Power Mac, the Mirrored Drive Doors G4 Mac, nicknamed Wind Tunnel. I was building my own custom MDD from parts, but I still need to get a working PSU for it, or fix the PSU, which I haven't gotten around to yet. Mine is a dual 1.25 GHz. IIRC it's the last Mac that can run classic Mac OS, which is why I wanted it. I'm not good at finishing my projects :/

lauland 512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!	Reply #23 on: September 15, 2025, 22:19 I've got linux (debian) set up on my ibook g4 just the way I like it, so dumped its partitions to disk images. I've been meaning to try copying those to either my tibook or my dual g4, to prove the theory that I can do that. Should work fine, using the same kernel and just need to adjust the partition numbers since those drives will be differently set up. Haven't done so as I haven't needed ppc linux for anything, but use x86 linux all the time, on, sadly, must faster machines than my macs. Basically I dd'd the partitions to files. Then I create partitions of the same (or larger) size, with the right types on the other machines. Can then dd the images to them in MacOS X. Need to set the boot flag on the linux os selector/boot partition and should be good to go. (After adjustments as above). I've got space on the tibook already for it, but its optical drive is dying, another reason to go with the disk image transfer instead of just installing debian. Meant to try BSD on the tibook, but, again, dying optical drive, so if I do try BSD it'll be on dual G4 or other mac probably. BTW Europa has been experimenting with "Polaris" which is Solaris for PPC, meant for IBM and Motorola PPC machines. They've been looking into the possibility of running it on a Mac and what that might take (the same way Windows NT 4.0 meant for those machines has been able to run on Macs). Probably not possible without writing some drivers, but might be. It looks like the firmware is very close, but probably missing something needed in early boot phase. They are using OF and TFTP'ing the kernel over the network, but it gives error in OpenFirmware.
Last Edit: September 15, 2025, 22:22 by lauland
wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #24 on: September 16, 2025, 00:20 I tried installing FreeBSD on my 17" G4 Powerbook. FreeBSD begins to start then hangs for 10-15 minutets eventually it finds the DVD drive (that seems very odd, since that is what it booting from), then it hangs again this time I gave it 45 minutes, but it never finds the hard drive. "Waiting for CAM" is the error. The hard drive in the machine is a M.2 device installed in an IDE adaptor, which might be the problem. FreeBSD might just get hung up sorting through all the bits of the adaptor. The good news is while watching the startup I can see that FreeBSD does seem to recognize all the bits of Apple hardware. Probably does not mean it has the drivers to run them, but at least it knows all the oddities that are in the machine. Eventually I will get around to trying the install on a regular IDE hard drive. I do also have a couple internal bits on the machine to fix. However these machines are time consuming to take apart, and I will probably wait until some cold winter day when there is nothing else to do.

ClassicHasClass 32 MB Posts: 39	Reply #25 on: September 16, 2025, 02:58 Another recommendation for Power MachTen. It's basically Classic inverted: Mach that runs as a task under the Mac OS, instead of the Mac OS running as a task under Mach. It's idiosyncratic and has some bugs, but it works fairly well, and it supports networking too. Otherwise I like Rhapsody for this, but it's finicky what it runs on, while Power MachTen will run on pretty much any Power Mac that can boot the classic Mac OS.

ShinobiKenobi 256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan	Reply #26 on: September 16, 2025, 07:38 @wove The only Mac laptop I've taken apart was the original Clamshell iBook. It originally had a 4 or 6 GB drive in it, so I put I think a 40 GB in it. But holy crap, I had to take apart almost the whole freaking laptop to replace a part that should be convenient to replace. Thanks for this topic. I've recently been wanting to install a distro on my 7200, so this is pretty helpful. One weird thing about the computer is that when System 7 is running, it doesn't recognize CDs. But if I boot into Mac OS 9, it does recognize CDs. I confirmed that the CD extension is in the extensions folder, so... Idk lol.
Last Edit: September 16, 2025, 07:44 by ShinobiKenobi
68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #27 on: September 16, 2025, 22:59 Did anybody even bother to take a look at MacShell, MacUnix or MacMint?

lauland 512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!	Reply #28 on: September 17, 2025, 00:38 Yes. Ever since I sat down in front of my first Mac, being from command line background on MSDOS, Amiga, and Sun Unix, what I dearly wanted was a "shell" where I could do things like use wildcards, etc. So I tried a lot of different things, from simple shells that just ran as a single mac app (maybe scriptable but couldn't run subtasks, etc), all the way to full blown os's that replace System 7/etc. They're all good and all have pros and cons, and you should use whatever works for you. There's TONS of "things" out there that will get you a "prompt" where you can type commands, but what is going on behind the scenes, and what you can do with them varies to a huge extent. Its very hard to tell how powerful or expandable they are until you look under the hood (and know enough about operating systems). FYI here's one we haven't mentioned (and I'm sure I could find a BUNCH more, like "nshell", look for it on MG): https://www.dsitri.de/projects/mac06/mac06.html (modern link) My personal needs were a full Unix environment, which, to me, meant fully protected virtual memory, a working fork(), real multitasking, something close to POSIX, and a C compiler. (MachTen is VERY close). My needs are in no way the same as all you guys, so, unless you need what I need, you certainly don't need to install a full OS that'd require partitioning, etc etc. Something simple like MacShell may do you well. So it depends on what we're talking about, are we talking about a shell prompt or an os, and the definitions can be blurry. Things like MacMint (non self hosted), MacMinix, and MachTen have a LOT of what I need, but run on top of MacOS. Are they "Unix", possibly arguably (depends on how pedantic you want to be). Are they "operating systems", not technically (again, splitting hairs). Does it REALLY matter, as long as you're happy with it? Basically I'm saying its all good, and I don't want to lead anybody down one particular path or the other, and can only speak from my own experience.
Last Edit: September 17, 2025, 00:47 by lauland
ShinobiKenobi 256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan	Reply #29 on: September 17, 2025, 02:45 Update note: I originally said it was MacSSH, but the correct app is ssheven ssheven-fat works good for me. It's the only UNIX-like "secure shell" that has worked for me so far with modern computers that use SSH. I use it to log into my main PC, which runs Mint Linux.
Last Edit: September 24, 2025, 04:32 by ShinobiKenobi
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