The PowerBook G4 line was the final iteration of Apple's popular PowerBook line of laptops. It was the culmination of the AIM alliance's production of PowerPC chips intended for use in laptops, starting with the Titanium PowerBooks and moving to the all-aluminum machines like the one I have.
My G4 was part of a lot of old Apple machines on eBay, marked as "for repair". This one arrived with a sticky note on it that simply read "Dead". Turns out it just needed a PRAM reset to start up again! The hard disk was missing, so I got a mSATA to IDE adapter board and installed a solid state disk. The machine was pretty beat up; the case was warped outward in several locations, everything was covered in grease and dust, and the F2 key was missing.
I gave the machine a good clean and opened it up to work further. I bent back the casing as best I could, blew out the interior with compressed air, and attempted to repaste the chips on the heat sink. However, one of the heatsink's reversed screws broke off at the PCB, effectively trapping the heatsink and the board together. Without carefully negotiating a cutting tool in there, I don't think I can remove the heatsink. Thankfully there's a software solution for increasing fan speed to make up for the substandard cooling.
I wanted to install Tiger on this machine initially, but found a major roadblock- I had no other working Apple computers to install it from! Just "dd"ing the image to disk doesn't suffice, you either need to burn to optical media or use Target Disk Mode with another Mac. I got some CDs to try the first route, but couldn't find the right Tiger image to boot on this machine. Finally I decided to go with OpenBSD and installed that directly to the root device. I really liked OpenBSD on this machine; the software availablility was great, you could build a minimal desktop with X pretty easily, and everything felt very snappy and responsive. However, there were a few major downsides that can be summarized by: "it's a laptop"! Suspend to disk didn't work and OpenBSD wouldn't recognize the lid latching- this means that I had to perform a full boot and shutdown sequence each time I used the machine. Power management was either lowest frequency or highest frequency on the CPU, getting status of the battery was convoluted, and there was no fan control via I2C. Eventually these issues together made using the laptop much more limited and it fell into the back of my projects pile.
A few months later, I heard about the Sorbet Leopard project which seeks to create a blend of Tiger and Leopard with Tiger-like performance and Leopard-like feature set, but with more modern SSL certs and other improvements. However, this really requires a second Mac computer to install- burning the disk image for Sorbet on any Intel Macs just doesn't work. Keeping my ear to the ground, I eventually got ahold of a G4 PowerMac with OSX installed. This was exactly the break I needed, and I installed Sorbet via target disk mode onto the root drive of this laptop. Sorbet runs great on this machine, even with the limited RAM, and gives all the "laptop-y" goodness that OpenBSD missed.
Recently I heard about the Old Computer Challenge and decided to use this machine for it. I wrote some blog posts about that, for more adventures with getting modern software working check them out!
This page and most of this website was written on this machine, in the terminal, using vim :)