I have more late 2011 21.5 inch iMac computers at my school than I know what to do with, so I decided to convert 2 into servers by removing all unnecessary hardware (Wi-Fi card, bluetooth card, antennas, CD drive, useless IR receiver, etc.) and installed Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS to run a Minecraft server and an NGINX file server on them.
However, Minecraft servers seem to have terrible performance on Ubuntu Server for some reason, and I've become very disillusioned with Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general due to ther propensity to break during updates and other annoying behavior.
I installed FreeBSD on a PC (that was originally destined to be scrapped) at my school to try it out; it worked amazingly well, so I decided to install it on the 2 iMac servers too.
However, I could not boot the FreeBSD installer via Ventoy on the iMac for some reason (ironically, BSD-derived OSes don't install on Apple hardware, despite macOS being largely BSD-derived!).
So, I took the hard drive out of the iMac, plugged it into the PC, and installed FreeBSD onto the iMac HDD (a special Apple firmware HDD), and then plugged it back into the iMac.
FreeBSD seems to work very well on the iMac; however, the console on the display of the iMac is weirdly laggy.
The LCD backlight never turns off, wasting power and generating pointless heat.
I don't think it's possible to physically disconnect the LCD and have the computer turn on, which is very unfortunate.
I wonder if there is perhaps some firmware that should be installed, but isn't, because the installation was perfomed on a different machine.
The iMac has an AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU, perhaps there is a driver or something I need to install?
I don't plan to use a GUI on this machine, and connecting from a different PC (an identical Mac running macOS) via SSH is a great option, but it would be nice to fix this laggy terminal just in case SSH is unavailable for some reason (if the DHCP IP address changes or there aren't enough ethernet ports available temporarily)
Also, I would like to find a way to turn off the display backlight to save power and prevent the computer from becoming hot for no reason.
On Ubuntu, I can configure the display to turn off by adding
However, Minecraft servers seem to have terrible performance on Ubuntu Server for some reason, and I've become very disillusioned with Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general due to ther propensity to break during updates and other annoying behavior.
I installed FreeBSD on a PC (that was originally destined to be scrapped) at my school to try it out; it worked amazingly well, so I decided to install it on the 2 iMac servers too.
However, I could not boot the FreeBSD installer via Ventoy on the iMac for some reason (ironically, BSD-derived OSes don't install on Apple hardware, despite macOS being largely BSD-derived!).
So, I took the hard drive out of the iMac, plugged it into the PC, and installed FreeBSD onto the iMac HDD (a special Apple firmware HDD), and then plugged it back into the iMac.
FreeBSD seems to work very well on the iMac; however, the console on the display of the iMac is weirdly laggy.
The LCD backlight never turns off, wasting power and generating pointless heat.
I don't think it's possible to physically disconnect the LCD and have the computer turn on, which is very unfortunate.
I wonder if there is perhaps some firmware that should be installed, but isn't, because the installation was perfomed on a different machine.
The iMac has an AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU, perhaps there is a driver or something I need to install?
I don't plan to use a GUI on this machine, and connecting from a different PC (an identical Mac running macOS) via SSH is a great option, but it would be nice to fix this laggy terminal just in case SSH is unavailable for some reason (if the DHCP IP address changes or there aren't enough ethernet ports available temporarily)
Also, I would like to find a way to turn off the display backlight to save power and prevent the computer from becoming hot for no reason.
On Ubuntu, I can configure the display to turn off by adding
consoleblank=n to the appropriate area of /etc/default/grub, is there something similar to that option/funtionality in FreeBSD?