This is not a PowerPC post. It is a behind-the-scenes post, and honestly one I am a bit proud of.
I love static blogs. Hugo builds this site in about a second, the output is just files, and there is no database waiting to break at 3 a.m. But there is one thing I kept missing: writing a post without opening a terminal. On the PowerMac G5 that is fine. On the couch, with a tablet, it is not.
Once upon a time I played a little bit with markdown, static files, php and so on and invented a small admin.php interface file where I can create markdown files, upload a picture and save that as a markdown file to the servers harddisk.
This was just a small test. Actually, I run two Hugo-Weblogs, one is TerminalDrome and one is Apfelhammer.de. And now it comes, wait for it: I adopted that small admin Interface to meet the needs of Hugo, TOML-Frontmatter instead of YAML, other paths to save files etc. pp. and this is my first post, using it. My english is as bad as it is, but anyways. It just works. Great.
There is a new version of Powerfox, the Firefox Port for classical Mac OS X Versions. PowerFox and PowerFox Classic are secure, modern, and open-source web browsers tailored specifically for your PowerPC or Intel Mac running anything from Mac OS X 10.3 Panther to macOS 10.14 Mojave.
There are two mainline powerts:
Actual version from November 1, 2026:
Or: how far you can push big-endian ppc64 before the GPU driver says no.
My PowerMac G5 runs ArchPOWER — Arch Linux for ppc64, big-endian, using the ELFv2 ABI. Firefox 157 runs there, but only with software rendering. So the idea was simple enough: Firefox 92 was the last release with the classic OpenGL compositor, before WebRender became mandatory. If anything could give this machine GPU-accelerated browsing, it would be FF92.
And so I sit here and think about how cool it would be to use this Powermac on a daily base but I do not have a daily use for it. I listen to music with TerminalDrome (Link) and read/write my Mail with Mutt and compile this static Website with hugo on another server (as I am connected to it while writing) and am happy about it but this is nothign real. All this is just something to bring time up. Down. In germany we say “Zeit herum bringen” and it means to do something unimportant to let the time slips away.
After getting a first working Openbox setup on the G5, it still felt a little plain. Time to crank up the cool factor a bit without adding any packages that aren’t available in the ArchPOWER repos. And there are a lot of Packages not available as I learned along the way.
The Openbox theme was refined with a vertical gradient on active titlebars, a brighter amber accent (), slightly softer borders, and animated iconify. The window buttons got a bit more contrast and a proper hover/press state. Inactive windows went a touch more muted to help the focused one pop.
My bigfat PowerMac G5 runs ArchPOWER for powerpc64 with Xfce4 and LXQt on top. One morning the desktop suddenly started throwing graphics errors, windows looked wrong and the session felt like it was about to fall apart. The day before, everything had been fine.
The obvious first guess — “something got updated” — was wrong. pacman -Syu upgraded nothing at all and pacman.log showed no changes for that boot. So the culprit had to be something else.
Hi, it’s been a while since we last spoke, and that’s reason enough for me to give you a little update.
Today I took the PowerMac G5 out of storage and set it up again. It’s now sitting next to my gaming PC—a Linux build—and they’re sharing a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The cat immediately jumped on it, as you can see in the photo.
I also commented on that in this post here. :)
Hey guys, there is a new version of Linux SDE T2/Linux with the codename Mythos. It delivers a further refined KDE Plasma desktop experience with integrated Flatpak and Discover app GUI store support, password-free installation, and the latest GCC 16.1, LLVM/Clang 22.1, Linux 7.0, and Mesa 26.1 package updates. This release significantly expands support for ARM64, RISC-V, IA-64, SPARC64, HPPA64, and other architectures, while now also providing a fully reproducible Wayland-based KDE Plasma desktop across both glibc and musl LLVM/Clang builds.
