FreeBSD on ibook G4 circa 2004

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 02/02/11 14:19, Michael Dinon wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Nathan Whitehorn 
> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org <mailto:nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, Michael Dinon wrote:
>
>         Hello,
>
>         I am looking for viable alternatives to keep an old ibook I
>         have running
>         relevant software.  I have in the past used Debian and various
>         other Linux
>         distros but support for PPC seems to be becomes less and less
>         viable.  I had
>         looked previously at the BSD's as an option for PPC and found
>         various
>         information although somewhat limited.  I am curious how well
>         supported is
>         PPC by FreeBSD, is there anyone on this list running similar
>         hardware and
>         using FreeBSD on as a laptop as opposed to server duty?  I
>         know the Broadcom
>         Airport Extreme card is not well supported by most opensource
>         OS's.  When
>         looking at some of the FreeBSD info on PPC I saw that at one
>         point certain
>         keyboards and trackpads were not supported which required USB
>         keyboards, is
>         that still true?  I also stumbled on a new installer
>         bsdinstall, has anyone
>         used this on similar hardware?  Also does one need to keep an
>         hfs partition
>         still?  I seem to remember Linux required an hfs partition,
>         not sure if that
>         is true of the BSD.  I don't plan on needing OSX.  Anyway
>         thank you in
>         advance for any help or suggestions.
>
>
>     Hi Michael --
>
>     I'm typing you this message over wireless on a 1.4 Ghz G4 iBook in
>     FreeBSD, so it works pretty nicely. The wireless driver (bwn) has
>     some kind of issue with the antenna gain, so I need to be closer
>     to the AP than in OS X, but otherwise the system works quite well.
>     All hardware is supported except the internal modem.
>     -Nathan
>
>
>
> Well that is definitely good to hear.  If I am correct you are the 
> person who is working on the bsdinstall installer I ran across.  Is 
> there anything I need to be aware of from a installer point of view? 
>  Does automatic partitioning work on PPC, do I need to create any 
> special hfs partitions or does the installer handle it without much 
> intervention?  Thank you for such a quick reply.

That is correct. BSDInstall does the right thing now with disk setup, 
and so works without handholding. The 8.2 release uses sysinstall and so 
requires some extra steps to do the partitioning if you want to use that.
-Nathan