Apfelhammer

Since I installed an RSS-Reader like its 2007, I read my friends again. That’s a thing I am really thankful for. And there, over at pfotenhauers frittiert.es, I read a blogpost about App Defaults. It’s about People who show other people what they are using for tools ’n apps on a daily base for working and living and in private.

I will do that, too.

App Defaults

Defaults

• Mail Client: mutt, Mail.app, Thunderbird
• Mail Server: self hosted, Linux
• Notes: Notizen.App
• To-Do: “Hey Siri, erinnere mich an…”
• iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
• Photo Management: Apple Photos
• Calendar: Google Calendar via Calendar.app
• Cloud File Storage: iCloud, (in reality I don’t like clouds)
• RSS service: NetNewsWire on iCloud :-)
• RSS client: NetNewsWire on iOS and macOS, SeaLion on Powermac G5
• Contacts: Kontakte.App
• Browser: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge,
• Chat: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, irssi
• Bookmarks: I don’t use Bookmarks anymore
• Read It Later: I don’t use those kind of tools
• Word Processing: Word, Pages, Markdown Formatting Textfiles
• Spreadsheets: Excel, Numbers
• Presentations: Powerpoint, Keynote
• Shopping Lists: Notizen.App
• Meal Planning: Notizen.App - Brot; Butter; Knoblauch
• Budgeting and Personal Finance: DKB Banking App
• News: NTV.App but I decided to not read news of the day anymore, just to protect my mental health.
• Music: Spotify
• Podcasts: Overcast
• Password Management: iCloud Keychain

Additional categories:

• Social Media: Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram
• Code Editor: nano, vim, neovim, textmate
• Blog: ghost cms (selfhosted), try different things like BashBlog (selfhosted)
• Terminal: Alacritty, iTerm2, warp
• Non-Smoking: Rauchfrei - since I quit smoking I track the amount of cigarettes, money and days.

All the apps are not clickable because I am too lazy to link everything. If you are interested, I think you can google or duckduckgo for it.

I had problems typing the backslash “" and bar “|” on my iMac keyboard when in the OpenFirmware user interface.

A picture of my iMac G3 while in Open Firmware

The “" key on US iMac keyboards seems to produce keycode 57 (in X11). There is no key on the German keyboard that produces keycode 57. There is one with keycode 58, the “#” key.

Due to the lack of a good graphical email client ¹ for my Arch POWER Linux Distro (Arch Linux for PowerPC), I tried several things and ended up with claws-mail. But it is not installable or not existing in the repos of pacman for powerpc. So I dcided to compile it by myself.

Claws-Mail 4.3.1 just compiled successfully on my Powermac G5.

claws-mail first window, first start

FreeDoS 1.4 Screenshot by freedos.org

As you all know, I’m a big fan of vintage computers. In addition to an iMac G3, a C64, and an Amiga 500/1200, I also run an MS-DOS PC with Windows 3.11 and networking capabilities. To enable file sharing, I have a small Samba 1 server running.

So it’s all the more exciting to see that the fantastic FreeDOS project has released a new version. FreeDOS 1.4 is here.

The other day I stumbled across Fienix Linux. It is a Distribution maintained by one man, Casey Cullen. It is based on debian, but with focus on powerpc first. I just tried to install it on my Powermac G5. And it works great!

Fienix Linux 6.0.1 on my Powermac G5, on real Hardware.

My Setup in this machine as follows:

I find it quite sad because I only recently got to know Fienix Linux, even though it has been around for a long time. And I think it’s absolutely great because it works better than any other Linux on the Powermac G5 that I’ve tried so far:

• Graphics acceleration
• modern web browser

But unfortunately the package sources are dead, this Linux is based on Debian SID and uses APT. The Fienix source server is unreachable and there is no alternative.

Since I own the Powermac G5 and play around with it, I want to install a modern Browser and therefor, I want to run Firefox on it. But it is not possible. I tried different Linux Distros like Debian 12 PPC64, T2/Linux by Rene Rebe and even some special builts of ARCH for PPC64 - but I had no luck. No one had luck and even the Debian Mailinglist said it is not possible to built Firefox for PPC64 at this time. I even wrote about that.

In a nice comment from Matias, he told me he is using ArchPOWER Linux, an unofficial Build of Arch Linux for PowerPC, PPC64, PPC and PPCle for the Power8 Architecture etc. pp.; If I remember correctly, I stumbled across this Linux Distro while I researched for the best Linux for my Powermac G5, but maybe because I was at the beginning of my Linux journey on these machines, I found it to heavy or something else told me not to try. I don’t know but it is not important anymore, because I installed ArchPOWER Linux current on my NVMe-SSD in the Powermac, multi-booting with T2 Linux, Debian 12 SID, Adelie Linux and Fienix Linux. :-)

Man, I am a little bit frustrated right now. Everytime a new release of T2/Linux is going online, I am really happy to try it out on my Powermac G5. I download it and dd it to a USB Stick (here I explain how to boot a PPC Mac from USB) and than boot the Powermac via OpenFirmware from that USB Stick and everything works like charme. Like I exspect it.

This is my first entry and I like the simplicity of bashlogging via one shellscript and the whole bashblog-number, a lot.

I will soon write a new css file to make it more… maybe pop-art.

Sincerely, Jan

[Update] I upgraded the CSS. Attached you’ll see the old design.