[wplug] The Great Mac Giveaway

[Ted Rodgers]

>>>Filmmakers will use the occasion to clear out old Macs from the IT
storage
>>>closet. We have Mac Minis, MacBooks, G5s, G4s, eMacs, and a few other
>>>odds and ends that all need to go. We'd like to give /you/ the
opportunity to take
>>>them.

>>>>>These Macs are too old to run OS X, but they should support Linux. You
>>>could /try/ Windows, but I don't know how well it would run.

Any Mac too old to run OSX is not Intel based --even the oldest Intel ones
will run earlier OSX versions.  Running Windows on them would only be
possible using Parallels or another emulation package and newer Windows
wouldn't be very appreciative of its new "cage" due to the memory/cpu
required for newer versions.

Depending on exact models/age/specs, yes Linux would run on most or all of
those.  Anything below a G4 would seem pretty slow for a desktop
environment (fluxbox, icewm, ion maybe???) or even intermediate crunching
(no Altivec for math).  A G5 is a much different beast and could
potentially be a lot of fun for someone although some models have quirks
that make initial installation require less point and click and more "fix
the bootloader."

The only truly tricky part would be getting firmware or finding a distro
that supports the hardware on a pre-canned CD:  the most popular one
(Yellow Dog --spun from RedHat source built for PPC) hasn't had a release
for 2 years and looking quickly, I can't find a mirror for it with anything
newer than the 2009 release.  Probably okay if you want to
learn/play/tinker behind a firewall, but for sure not safe to expose to the
net raw or even for surfing around with outdated browsers/plugins and no
simple way to update to safer versions.

That said, old hardware is fun to learn with and there are sure to be
distros that have at least unofficial 32 bit PPC support still lingering
around the wings.  G5 are 64 bit, so finding a supporting distro for those
may be a lot easier.

Ted