Brad Morton's Apple PowerMac G4 Gets a Modern Browser — Courtesy of a Sneaky Raspberry Pi Upgrade
Writing for LinuxScrew, Morton shows off a partially-successful meld of the old and the new by mating a PowerMac G4 with a Raspberry Pi.
Maker Brad Morton has published a build log showcasing an effort to make practical use of a classic Apple PowerMac G4 — by connecting it to a Raspberry Pi to fill in the gaps in its networking support.
Released in 1999 and discontinued in 2004, the Apple PowerMac G4 family was billed by the company as the first "personal supercomputer" thanks to its high-performance PowerPC G4 processor. The move from PowerPC to Intel processors, announced in 2005 and completed in 2006, and subsequent release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard as supporting Intel chips exclusively marked the PowerMac G4's obsolescence — officially, at least.
"My latest purchase. The PowerMac G4. Stylish. Powerful (For 2001). Completely impractical in 2021," Morton writes of the project. "Why did I get it? Because it looks cool, and I really like the late 90’s/early 2000’s design of Apple’s hardware. It’s all translucent and cool."
"There’s still a lot of good software for these old Macs – and the simplicity of them is kind of nice, so I thought – could I use one for modern day-to-day tasks? The answer was pretty much yes – except for email and web browsing. This is my attempt (and failure, and consolation prize) to remedy that, using a Raspberry Pi and Linux."
The stock software on Morton's Mac - 256MB of memory, a 400MHz processor, and a CompactFlash card for storage - proved capable, all these years later, of basic computing tasks. "Office and productivity, graphics, audio tools, and even games are all available," Morton writes. "They’re pretty usable – in some cases, simple tools that feel less cluttered and bogged down with unnecessary online features than their modern iterations."
The problem: The modern web, and email, has moved on considerably in the last couple of decades, leaving Morton with no easy way to access modern websites — nor any desire to connect a device which hasn't seen a security update in 20 years to his home network. The solution: A Raspberry Pi go-between, using the X Window system to run modern networked applications on the Raspberry Pi but have them appear on the Mac.
"I tried Dillo with plain old X11 forwarding and... Color and keyboard input! The window is also resizeable if the correct MacX setting is set under the Window menu item," Morton writes. "OK, so it’s pretty busted up, but it’s still pretty cool. It works well enough for taking screenshots, at least. Most importantly – the Mac is still 100% isolated from the rest of the world by the Pi."
The full write-up of Morton's experiment, including failed efforts to get other browsers up and running and a full explanation of how to enable SSH with X forwarding between the Raspberry Pi and the Mac, is now available on LinuxScrew.