Post sent using tut from an olde EfikaMX smart top machine.
I think I might be among the few still using one of these — and I actually use it for a lot of things: it hosts a squid proxy (together with privoxy and tor to access the network), acts as a file server (it has a 5 Tb USB drive attached to it, it had a second 1,5 Tb one — but that one died), hosts my Gemini capsule, a web remote for Samsung TV that I cobbled together in Python…
@gray
Sadly, their machines, neither ARM, nor PowerPC ones, didn't get as much community love as Raspberry Pis did.
TBH, it took me years to finally start using my EfikaMX after getting it — so there simply was no way for me to return it 😂
It didn't play well with my TV and I didn't have other HDMI displays at the time. Later I've figured out a way to work that around an I used it as a makeshift media center with TV, it had a web-based remote for Totem in Python.
@gray
But I have updated most other software in Debian it had — it even has a more or less recent GCC on it, I wasn't cross-compiling it and built it natively — took me ages 😂
I even had to use swapfile on external USB drive, it slows down to a crawl when you do this — but it was worth it, with gccgo I can build some nice software on it natively.
Oh, speaking of Go, almost forgot — it hosts Bloat too!
I remember that their customer support at the time was emailing back and forth with one of the founders.
@gray
Yeah, it's truly sad that PowerPC failed to take off as mainstream of at the least, enthusiast platform. I still use my PowerPC machines, my own Pemorla instance is running on an old G4 MacMini as you probably know, and I have a PowerMac G5 too.
Sadly, the life of these machines seems to be coming to an and, there seem to be bad and hard to catch bugs in kernels newer than 6.1, which make them run unstable.
@gray
Big Endian PowerPC is also poorly supported in Go, 32-bit isn't supported at all and a lot of software is in Go nowadays 😩
I keep saying I’m going to get a PowerBook 12 inch one of these days.
@gray
My MacMini has definitely seen interesting days — I've been even using it for audio recording when jamming with my friends, today it's hard to believe that we could pull it off, we've been recording two analog instruments, such as bass or guitar and mic, and a bunch of midi devices — the UI of Mac OS X got completely unresponsive, beach ball all the way — but the recording went on flawlessly 😲
Early Intel Macs weren't nearly as good at multitasking!
@gray
There was a community effort to make a modern PowerPC laptop, but I'm not sure it even made it to the prototype stage and nowadays it would take way more effort to make such a machine usable: Go isn't supported very well — even though you can get a working toolchain with gccgo, a lot of modules can't be built without quirks, Node.js doesn't support PowerPC anymore — most likely due to V8 no longer being maintained, Rust works fairly well, but you might still run into problems.
@gray
Yeah, Breloma.m0xEE.Net is hosted on a Mac Mini actually, it's very easy to tell when someone boosts my post — I can hear its fans spinning up 🤣
@gray
Sadly, it was the time when most of the development ceased. I got an Xbox, so it wasn't very useful.
Later I've found a way of using it completely headless as a VPN box and proxy — and this is where it truly got its second life, I still use it in this role, but as you can see, it does so much more now.
It's still running old 2.6 kernel with backported network subsystem, I've never found a way to append device tree and make 3.0 boot on it.