If you're reading Low End Mac, you probably own an older Mac, one
that you adore and want to keep running and viable long past the
sell-by date. With the tips and tricks you've found here, you likely
have made your Blue and
White G3 last longer than anyone ever expected - even the engineers
at Apple. That G4 Cube
that you bought on a whim is still purring along, quiet and stylish.
And you even have a few G3
iMacs in use, processing words and slowly displaying web pages.
But the writing is on the wall. None of those units are officially
supported by Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", and they sure as shooting
won't be supported by OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard". Truth be told,
they are getting a little slow on the uptake, maxed RAM or not.
If this is you - and especially if you run your own small business -
where your formerly idiosyncratic choice of Macs is indicative of your
working style, these Macs have at least one more iteration of service
left to you: LAMP.
LAMP is an acronym for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It's a collection of software
(called a stack, in server parlance) that turns any ordinary machine
into a server capable of dishing out dynamic websites. And, like every
flavor of open source software, it's free. And while it's getting
harder to find vendors that provide this sort of software for PowerPC
architectures, one of the oldest and most respected, Debian, still does.
Linux on Macs has been discussed here a great deal lately, with some
folks downright down on the idea - and I can see where they're coming
from. Linux, no matter how far it has progressed, is no Mac OS. Apple's
flagship operating system is all swooshes and rounded corners and
polish. Linux, at best, is a bit rough around the edges, unexpectedly
sharp in places, and showing duct tape in others. But when you consider
the limitations of your 16 MB graphics card plus your slower hard drive
and system bus, Linux - and especially a Linux installation that does
not use a graphical interface - can look past some of those issues.
Linux without a GUI
You heard right - no GUI. Your beloved Snow iMac is destined for
service, not for play, and an expensive desktop (in terms of
performance) is a waste of limited resources. Don't be too scared,
though. One of the first things you can do is install a web-based
graphical configuration tool (webmin, for example) and get some of those
same features without all the overhead.
Apache is the de facto standard for serving up websites. A favorite
under Unix for ages, it's also the same software that Apple includes in
OS X (the Personal Web Sharing system preference). This is no
different than turning on the web services on your Mac - just a little
bit peppier and a bit more complex to configure. Again, web-based
configuration tools can help ease this pain, as can many excellent
online
resources.
MySQL doesn't come standard with your Mac, but it is one of the most
popular flavors of SQL database out there. For smaller scale operations
(and more recently, enterprise class operations) it serves admirably,
and again, the price can not be beat. Online tutorials can get you from
installation to full utilization in a matter of minutes.
Finally we come to the P in LAMP. This is a little more flexible and
depends on what you're doing. Perl, PHP, and Python all serve admirably
in creating dynamic content on the Web, with PHP being the most
popular, and Python making rapid inroads in recent years. Whatever
flavor works best for you - and this might be dictated by software
bundles that you choose to run, like forum software, or online store packages - will work
wonderfully under Linux.
Requirements for Linux on Your Mac
There are several Linux distributions available that support PowerPC
architecture, officially or unofficially. Debian is one of the oldest and most
respected distributions still in development, and they are still in the
business of supporting PowerPC. A bare install, plus the necessary
support software (Apache, MySQL, PHP) comes in at less than 800 MB - an
easy fit even on an old 2 GB hard drive. (In interest of fairness,
this is my goto distribution for older hardware to be used as a server
- while some of the newer distributions have made great advances in
desktop usability, that's wasted on a CLI-only server.)
Yellow Dog
Linux still supports PowerPC actively, but for anything older than
a G4 you'll have to go back from the current version (6.x) to a prior
release. Not even all G4s are supported by 6.x - my eMac ceased to be
supported with the release of 4.x. It's hard to get an exact fix on how
much disk space to expect to use with a simple LAMP installation, but a
normal desktop installation, with all the bells and whistles of a
graphical desktop and productivity software fits in 3 GB, so I
would expect it to still fit in less than 2 GB without the
GUI.
A community-supported branch of Slackware, called Slackintosh, is still currently in
development as well, thought not as actively as some others. This is
not a distribution for the faint of heart, requiring quite a bit of
hand configuration, but it is quite fast and an efficient use of
resources. A reasonable system with a stripped down GUI can be made to
fit in less than 300 MB of drive space, and a similarly frugal LAMP
system in less than 250 MB.
Finally, there is arguably the most popular distribution in current
development - Ubuntu. The folks at
Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu, stopped officially
supporting PowerPC two versions back. That said, the unofficial support
community is huge, and there's very little lag time between an official
Intel release, and the unofficial PowerPC port being made available.
Here again, you can get into a base LAMP installation for under
1 GB of hard drive space.
Regardless of the distribution you choose, when it comes to memory
utilization, more is better. A bare minimum to start the party would be
64 MB, but do not expect MySQL to perform very well - it may not even
run at all! I would not recommend this setup for anything but serving
up static web pages. If you're going to really use the M and P in LAMP,
you'll want a minimum of 128 MB of RAM, preferably 256 MB or more.
Given that most folks who have kept their Snow iMac or Mirror Drive Door G4 tower alive
this long have already maxed the RAM in their systems, it shouldn't be
too much of a problem.
I've focused on G3 era Macs and newer with this article, but if
you're one of our hard-core readers and have an old Power Mac 8500 sitting around
gathering dust, it too can be pressed into service - just don't expect
earth-shattering performance, and expect to have to tinker a bit more
to make it happen. But with support for 512 MB of RAM, it might not be
quite as slow as you expect. Heck, I've got a 6500 that's got a date with Debian
as soon as I get more RAM installed.
Linux and LAMP are not panaceas. You're not going to be running
Victoria's Secret's streaming video fashion shows on your eMac. But by
using these free tools and investing just a bit of time into research -
most everything you'd want to do has almost certainly been done by
someone, somewhere, with a
penchant for sharing - you can give your favorite Yikes! G4 tower one more shot at
not just making due, but really being a productive member of your
office. 
