## 2026-02-03

In November 2017 while thrifting with my ex, I found a tangerine iMac G3/333 with its original keyboard.

I had no idea if it worked, nor did I know all that much about it, architecturally speaking. However, it was $70, and this was during the time in my life that I was a rabid Apple fanatic- don't apologize for the judgements, I understand.

I bought it, and was thrilled to find that after bringing it back to my parents' house, it worked. It had no operating system installed, but it otherwise booted without any issues. One ebay purchase of some OS X Panther install disks later, and I had it up and fully running. I frankly don't remember too much of what I managed to do with it- I think I managed to get opera or some other contemporary browser installed on it? Though I'm not even sure if I had ever managed to get it online.

At some point, it turned into a very large paperweight that moved between desks, closets, and corners of rooms. But when I leapt out of the Apple frying pan in 2022/2023 and into the Linux fire, somewhere along the way I had the idea to put Debian on it.

The natural starting place for this was obviously Debian Jessie, the last version of the distro that officially supported the 32-bit PowerPC architecture. And wouldn't you know it? It just worked. Well, after wasting a few CDs because I'd apparently written then too quickly, if I recall correctly. I also at this point upgraded the base memory (from 256MiB, I think?) to 512MiB using an "[A0383205 512MB PC133 Memory Dell Inspiron 3700 4100](https://www.ebay.com/itm/192791214383)" Memory Stick.

This made for an awesome novelty project- I even got some cool terminal programs like cmatrix and hyfetch running on it, which were fun to show off to my friends. But then I found in [a MacRumors forum thread](https://web.archive.org/web/20250908055651/https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/debian-sid-installation-guide-powerpc.2146795/) that [debian-ports](https://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/) had some level of support for PowerPC, and proceeded to completely fuck up my debian install, because I couldn't be bothered to buy more blank CDs to put experimental disc images on, and tried to directly jump 4 releases at once. I hadn't gotten the opportunity to return to this project before I eventually moved to another state, into an apartment that didn't really provide me room for projects like that, so I wound up leaving it in my home town. Upon moving out of that apartment and into my (at time of writing) current residence, I reacquired it and am hoping to see just how far I can push this thing. Below is an image of the first time I booted it back up again after my move, apparently displaying the state I left this thing in.

![A photograph of an orange iMac G3 running Debian Buster logged into a TTY](https://pogmom.me/assets/img/plog/imac_g3/2025-07-25.jpg)

I have no idea how viable this really is right now ([apparently the kernel might be troublesome?](https://web.archive.org/web/20260204063354/https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2020/04/msg00087.html)) but I have much more experience at this point with manual Debian installs, including on unconventional hardware. That said, I expect PowerPC support in Debian's unstable version has not gotten any better than when I first attempted this, especially seeing as Trixie (current Stable release) marked the end of support for another 32-bit architecture, i386.
I think my next approach will focus on [booting via USB](https://idevicecollector.home.blog/2019/04/02/how-to-boot-your-powerpc-g3-g4-or-g5-from-usb-using-open-firmware-mode/), which I couldn't seem to get working in the past. But if that fails, I've got enough blank CDs now that I should be set- and I plan to document commands & post disk images that I confirm work.
