This story begins, as all good stories do, on eBay. I was looking around at Apple PowerPC hardware as one does when they can't buy a Raptor computer, and figured I could round out my Gs while also playing around with Linux on Power ISA. I already had a Power Mac G4 (AGP 450) and an iBook G3 (14" 900), but I figured if I had a G5 I could use it as a daily driver stopgap until I had enough for a Blackbird. It turned into a bit more of an adventure.
I saw the one pretty quickly on, it was listed as for parts only, not even salvageable, except the screen was showing an image. That seemed strange for a for parts only listing, but the $45 price tag matched up with the idea that it was a completely gone computer. Then I saw the description, which read as follows.
Needs new OS. Has linux installed, don't know the password. Works fine otherwise. Very clean and nice.
I almost laughed, though the indignance that I get when older computers see disrespect was well present too. After all, this was a functional, usable computer that was being sold to be parted out just because the guy didn't know what the password was. I thought it was a score, and that it would fill the gap nicely.
Excited, I put in the order, and it only took a few days to arrive at my house. That is to the seller's credit -- and essentially one of the only things to their credit. It was packed... well, a little too well. I'm glad that it arrived alright, but the problem was that it couldn't fit through my door. I had to open the first box up in order to get to the second box that actually had... another box in it. That last box finally contained the shrink-wrapped iMac G5 in it, complete with power cord. It was so cartoonish I had to take a group photo as soon as possible.
I wiped it down as well as I could, without any cloths or cleaning fluid -- just some lens cleaner -- and sat it right down on my cheap plastic table, plugged it in, and... had my ears blown out by the startup chime. I mean, it sounded deeper and bassier than I had ever heard it before (I don't have any actually good speakers, so I just used the Power Mac's inbuilt ones), but it was also about 70 decibels louder. Like, to the point I was afraid to turn it on at night for fear of the sound waking up my family. And that screen is absolutely atrocious. Gray-blacks, 60Hz refresh, and it strobed like hell. They claimed that the LCD Studio Display was 'twice as good' as a CRT, but if this screen is this horrible and it's better specced, I have to call BS. It actually risked giving me eyestrain, which none of my CRT monitors have ever done (mainly becauase I run them at high refresh rates, like the manufacturers intended).
Well, sure enough, it booted right into Linux, giving me my first glimpse into how Linux was in 2012, with an install of Debian 6. Then I promptly fell into the same issue the seller had, which was a lack of a password to actually get into the system. I wanted to test it out before reinstalling Linux on it, just to check if it was worth keeping or if I ought to just put Mac OS X on it and ship it back out, so in one of my less proud moments I wiped the user and admin passwords and snooped around.
Nothing good, but it got horrible performance --- it stuttered playing Quadrapassel, a GTK Tetris clone. Windows stammered when resizing or moving. It ought to have been an ominous sign, but it wasn't for whatever reason. I just thought it was an older version of Nouveau.
It wasn't. My next move was to install Void Linux onto it, as one of the few PPC64BE Linuces and one of the biggest repositories of PowerPC Linux software, and it... didn't go smoothly. It took a whole few hours to get into the installer, and once I was into it, it took a whole reinstall in order to get any sort of desktop going, even the Xfce that I knew it could boot into just fine.
Speaking of Xfce, it was sluggish. Somehow. Xfce I've never considered one of the most lightweight desktops, but it was still one of the lighter ones. Stuttered and windows didn't redraw on time. Except, that doesn't seem to be its fault now that I've tried all of the other desktops I wanted to use. MATE, Window Maker, and IceWM, none of them really was any more responsive than the other. I'm seriously wondering if one of my RAM sticks is dying -- especially when it says I have 1870MB.
Someone I know mentioned their G5 wouldn't run certain programs and had super sluggish performance because one of their RAM sticks was going bad. It seemed oddly familiar --- Blender, for instance, ought to have ran but didn't. It didn't even try to crash, just never opened in the first place. It all seemed eerily similar.
But at the same time, I've seen video of MATE desktop running on an iMac G5 and it didn't seem to work much faster than mine did, so it might really just be that the iMac G5 sucks.
For Linux.
I've been trying to install Sorbet Leopard, but it doesn't seem to want to boot the partition. It doesn't show up in the option-key menu, nor does it boot in Open Firmare. If I figure it out, I'll post a part 2.
For now, though, I think I'll probably get two new sticks of RAM, and a 256GB SSD is already on its way. If that doesn't fix it... well, it's getting sold off once I figure out a way to install OS X onto it. It somehow performs significantly worse in GrafX2 (a program that runs fine on MS-DOS) than my iBook G3 does. Maybe that's attributable to PPC64 Linux --- probably is, they probably tune it for dual-processor Power Macintosh G5s. I'll give Linux one very last go on the iMac G5, using the 32-bit version, and see if that makes it any better. But I'm not really optimistic. I really want to like the iMac G5, it's a really pretty computer, but it has so many things riding against it that it's going to need a miracle (and a microLED panel would be nice, too).
Here's to that miracle.
It's now been about six months (at present, it's July 16, 2022) since I wrote the body of the article up there. I've jumped ship from Void to Sorbet Leopard, and it was an instant improvement, and made the G5 feel pretty much as snappy and responsive as a modern computer. I still want to try Linux out on it again, and I will, but I can't do so at the moment, because I'm stuck in the middle of moving. BonSlack is something I'd really like to try out considering how much I loved Slackware 14.2 when I used it.