Apfelhammer

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.

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.

Tweaks

A glossier Graphite-Amber theme

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.

A solution to have GPU acceleration on PowerMac 11,2 G5

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.

Hi, I switched my Weblog Apfelhammer.de to Hugo SSG, because Bashblog was cool for just short things, but with Indieweb Support, changing Themes and Webmention sending and receiving, it was to buggy for me.

Bye

Because I just started to build a new x86-64 Linux Gaming/Coding-Rag, I stopped with Linux on the Powermac G5, for now. But not forever.

Mein PC Build 2026

The Browser is called BrassMonkey and is a fork of legendary Wicknix’s SeaLion from Linux. The version we are talking about is from Nov 2025 but was only available for Intel Mac 10.6 and got now his way to 10.5 PPC. It is also based on the modern UXP Engine like Powerfox (Link) is, and has a new updated code for even better compatibility with logging into websites. It also doesn’t have a JIT Compiler, so script heavy sites will be very slow. But it is written that people on the MacRumours Forums are currently in the process of porting a JIT to Powerfox. Maybe it will also be available for BrassMonkey.

Embedded Engineering Meets Cross-Architecture Desktop Ambition

T2/Linux has released version 26.3 “Desktop Edition,” marking a significant milestone in delivering a modern, cross-architecture desktop experience.

The distribution distinguishes itself by providing a fully reproducible KDE Plasma Wayland session across nine different CPU architectures, including x86, ARM64, PowerPC, and RISC-V. This achievement is built on T2’s long-standing foundation as a system development environment engineered for strict cross-compilation, architectural correctness, and deterministic builds.

Anyone who reads my blog from time to time is familiar with my PowerMac setup. I have two SSDs connected to the internal SATA ports: a 512 GB SATA SSD for Mac OS X 10.5 and a 128 GB SSD for Linux. I also have an NVMe SSD connected to the internal PCI Express x4 port.

The 128 GB SSD for Linux runs Debian 12 SID, and its primary function is to boot the actual Linux distribution from the NVMe SSD. The PowerMac, specifically the Open Firmware, doesn’t have drivers for NVMe, and neither does Mac OS X. Therefore, it boots Grub from the internal SSD to load the correct kernel and partition from the NVMe SSD.