FreeBSD 9 or 10 on MacMini G4 1.42 GHz

[rihatum]

Hi all,

I have an old Mac Mini with 1 GB RAM. It's a Mac Mini with a 1.42 G4 processor. I want to install freebsd FreeBSD 9 or 10 on it and use it as a media server - to stream movies/music to an iPhone/iPad. Questions:

1. Can I use a bootable freebsd usb FreeBSD USB to install freebsd FreeBSD onto this Mac Mini?
2. Shall I upgrade more RAM into this machine or should 1 GB be OK?
3. I also want to run dns, dhcp DNS and DHCP on this freebsd? FreeBSD.

This will be my first time installing freebsd FreeBSD and using it, so please ignore any mistakes I have made in asking my question - thanks.

Kind regards.

 

[tingo]

1. Yes, it should work. However, you might end up learning a lot about OFW (OpenFirmware) in the process. As an example, here is the "magic trick" I used on a PowerBook G4 to boot from a USB stick:
   

   devalias ud /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1
   boot ud:,\boot\loader ud:0

   It will most likely be different for your Mac mini.
2. 1 GB will probably be enough.
3. There shouldn't be any problems there.

Note that the PowerPC is still a Tier 2 architecture in FreeBSD. This means that it might not be as easy to get it working as a Tier 1 architecture. If you have any i386/amd64 hardware available, I would suggest doing your first installation on that (you can install on external storage, for example a USB hard drive) to get a feel for how it works first, before diving into all the fun and challenges of a Tier 2 platform.

 

[DrJohnnyFever]

I know this is old but for anybody else that stumbles on this topic, I just want to say I have had extremely good luck running FreeBSD 9 on the G4 Mac Mini. The only Tier 2 "issue" I have had is simply having to build from source. Most of my FreeBSD systems are either PowerPC or UltraSPARC and I have had very good luck in general with G4 Macs and common SunFire servers. Powermac G5 towers I have had less luck with, however.

I will add that it is probably worthwile installing a newer GCC for building ports, it seems to produce a tangible performance improvement even on the G4. I use GCC 4.8 myself, I believe that is the current default ports GCC. Clang may work, I have not tried it yet.