Just recently got an iMac G3 DV 400Mhz and I want to repurpose it to run FreeBSD as light-weight server at home (rsync, squid, reverse SSH tunnels, et al)
Hardware Overview:
- PowerMac 2,1
- PowerPC 750 (83.2)
- Boot ROM Version: 4.1.9f1
- RAM: 384MB
- CPU Speed: 400Mhz
Here’s what I have tried.
Used the ppc (boot only) ISO of FreeBSD 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 (all -RELEASE) to boot off a CD – it goes through orange screen with all OFW stuff, I hit Enter then it goes through the boot process but then all of a sudden, the machine reboots.
All 4 major releases render the same results.
In terms of booting off a CD with all the attempts I’ve made to get into the FreeBSD installer, I tried the built-in slot-loading drive and an external CD/DVD drive (USB).
FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE, -STABLE and 13-CURRENT gets stuck but doesn’t reboot and halts. Links to screen shots are below: https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot1.jpg https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot2.jpg https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot3.jpg
I know this is unrelated, but I managed to install OpenBSD 6.6 ppc on the same machine using the same booting method.
Anyhow, I sent an email to the freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org mailing list just in case someone can provide some pointers to resolve my installation issues. – https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2020-March/011589.html