# FreeBSD on PowerMac G4?



## neogranas (Jul 29, 2009)

Yes, I did search the forum for 'powermac G4' and didn't come up with anything.

My question is about installing to this old machine, is it possible? Does anyone know how to reformat a Mac? I've held down the C key when I reboot but it's not giving me anything (I got that method from the Apple support site). It doesn't really boot, and for whatever reason I am not able to boot from a disc. It tries to boot, and I've swapped out hard drives trying to force it to boot from a disc but no luck.

Does anyone know if I'm wasting my time or if this can be done?


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## bb (Jul 29, 2009)

I tried FreeBSD on a G4 Mac Mini once. You have to go into the open firmware prompt and boot a kernel manually. I also setup the variables in open firmware to boot FreeBSD automatically, but at the time of testing, the screen stayed dark. The other problem was that the battery was dead, and so the settings didn't survive a power loss.

So I could boot FreeBSD manually from the open firmware prompt, and was happy to have a usable text console (was not the case with NetBSD). 

But I couldn't get X11 to work, and generally, I don't think you can really do anything interesting with such a system.


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## joel@ (Jul 29, 2009)

Take a look in the freebsd-ppc mailing list archive.


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## neogranas (Jul 29, 2009)

joel@ said:
			
		

> Take a look in the freebsd-ppc mailing list archive.



Thank you Joel, I will look into that.


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