The iBook G4 in 2014

Most computers have the shelf-life of a carton of milk, compared with, say, refrigerators. One of the causes is, of course, planned obsolescence, and if you’d like to get a good grip on that idea, there’s an interesting documentary about it here. Another is that, independent of any conscious design patterns, the dominant trend in software and hardware design is that novelty is worth sacrificing legacy hardware to the e-waste heap.

If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s dominant trends. Say hello to my personal laptop.

It’s a cutie. And by all accounts, it should probably be dead (I almost killed it once, actually.) This was not, however, my first foray into finding uses for hardware that shouldn’t be running, and I was determined to drag it into this decade, kicking and screaming or otherwise.

Getting it

I acquired this particular machine from my work. While we were doing some spring cleaning, I found a milk crate with nine of these machines, as well as five or six chargers (our IT guy had two more sitting in his office, which I believe is where mine was). To our surprise, most of them worked (the ones that didn’t had been wiped, or gutted for parts)! Rather than let these things get melted down for raw materials, I aggressively hunted down foster homes for them, and managed to place all of the working units in loving homes.

However, while many of them are certainly sitting in closets or serving as glorified DVD players, I had designs on mine. I adore the Mac OS X interface, and I have a 20" early 2008 iMac at home running Mavericks. But, short of converting one of my laptops to a Hackintosh (either via a virtual machine or through some patient hacking) I had no financially viable way of taking that experience on the road.

Or, at least, I didn’t, until I happened upon this iBook.

Bringing it to life

Maintenance

It’s important to survey the hardware of any machine you get, but it is doubly so when dealing with legacy hardware. Luckily, since I was getting my machine from an enterprise environment (specifically, a university) I didn’t have to worry about some of the pitfalls of used hardware. Other than some case scratches and a battery that only charges to 60–70% capacity, the thing seemed to be in working order.

I asked the IT professional who was overseeing the “foster home” process to clean out some of the encrusted system gunk that accrues over a long span of use in an enterprise environment (lots of user accounts, outdated software, and on my particular machine, two versions of Microsoft Office!). I checked the disk, saw that it was in working order, and set about configuring my user account

Software

Before I added anything, I needed to ditch quite a bit of crud. On a machine this old, iLife was going to be a series of stalls, crashes, and otherwise catastrophically bad performance. Ditto Office. So they went right to the trash, along with some other, smaller items that just weren’t necessary.

In lieu of Safari, I installed the incredible TenFourFox browser, which is a port of Firefox 31 to the PowerPC architecture, and is essential to do just about anything on the Web. I say “just about anything,” because security concerns regarding older versions of Flash necessitate its omission from the browser’s functionality. To get around this, I grabbed MacTubes, a YouTube desktop client that can play video in QuickTime, rather than Flash, and with performance comparable to modern machines.

Rather than go with an office suite, I went and grabbed the MacTeX distribution of LaTeX, and an Emacs derived editor, mostly because it’s a lot less memory intensive to run a text editor than some bloated GUI word processor, and because LaTeX replaces both a document editor and a presentation package (with Beamer).

Finally, to my elation, I found that Python 2.7.6 runs on the PPC architecture, so I grabbed that for when I need to cobble something together. Unfortunately, Python (or, rather, attempting to expand Python) is where I ran into my first huge snag.

Trouble in Paradise

Part of why I want to learn Python is because, given its aptitude for dealing with strings, it makes an ideal candidate for attempting to automate some of the tasks associated with textual analysis. So, I went and grabbed the Natural Language Toolkit, along with about 3 GB of corpora necessary to its functioning.

Let’s do some math. Before I started out, I had about 10 GB of space on my iBook. Stack on MacTeX, and we lose about 3–4 GB. Photoshop CS2, which I grabbed on a lark, left another 1 GB filled. We’re starting to get into some troublesome waters. During the installation process of the corpora, I found myself ditching some applications to save space (iMovie 6, which I had downloaded just to see if it’d run, went first, then some others). I managed to scrape by with 3 GB of disk space left.

Or, so I thought. The first sign of trouble was when I typed “clear” into the terminal, and it wouldn’t recognize it. So, I figured, why not restart?

I came to be very familiar with this screen. Familiar with, and enraged by. A part of me wanted to be done with the thing and sell it for parts.

I did not listen to that part of me. Instead, I tried a number of things: resetting the parameter RAM (Command-Option(alt)-P-R), booting into Single User Mode (hold Shift while booting), and booting into Verbose mode to see the actual panic code(Command-V). This last one was especially helpful — I searched for the text of the panic, and found that it was a hard drive issue.

Next, I found a PowerPC Linux distribution that booted from CD — I went with Finnix 110, because it was small and only had command line tools — and set about trying to erase the drive from there. No luck; I could only mount the drive as a read-only device. What this did tell me, however, was that the drive worked!

Remember the IT guy from earlier? He just happened to have a copy of 10.4 server on hand, which installed, wiping the old, error-laden installation in the process.

Recovery and Next Steps

I got an older MacTeX distribution installed (10.4 only runs MacTeX 2010 and earlier, which means I don’t get Knuth’s TeX’14 patches), reintroduced TenFourFox, grabbed TenFourBird for mail and chat, and put back Emacs, Python 2.7.6, and MacTubes.

Lessons: put Nltk on my desktop and SSH into it when I need to use it, leave 20% of the hard drive open, and always thank your IT professional.

The next major struggle is to find a battery that doesn’t blow. I just ordered a third-party one off of Amazon using credit card rewards points, and hopefully it behaves well. It would be wonderful to get more than two hours of battery life out of this thing, but I’m not holding my breath.

All in all, the takeaway is this: if you own an iBook G4, or if someone gives one to you, you can put this thing to work, so long as you’re careful.