Unix software from pkgsrc for Mac OS X 10.4 (PowerPC Tiger)

Introduction

PowerPC Macs were produced in huge numbers, and a lot of this hardware is still viable for use today, with professional software such as Photoshop CS2 and Propellerheads Reason. They're still good workstations, with lots of productivity software, and no always-online tracking or distractions. Originally, I got mine for running NetBSD, but found the pull of 20 year old commercial software too tempting to resist.

Regardless, how usable is Mac OS X 10.4 for Unix professionals, software developers, and command-line junkies? A surprising amount of free software can still run, often with some simple adjustments. The pkgsrc framework offers a platform-netural repository with powerful frameworks that allow wide porting of software.

Pre-built PowerPC binaries for popular software are available, including PostgreSQL, ImageMagick, Python 3, Wget, cURL, FFmpeg, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Apache Web Server, nginx, yt-dlp, SDL, Midnight Commander, and many more.

Note: I make no guarantees about the security or up-to-dateness of these packages, though I pinky promise they're better than what Tiger includes by default. No warranty. Your fridge may explode. Also, you may find you're suddenly able to connect to servers that use modern encryption.

How to install software

Bootstrapping

Download the bootstrap kit

Extract the bootstrap kit on 10.4, set your PATH:


$ sudo tar -C / -xzpvf bootstrap-tiger.tar.gz
$ export PATH=/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/pkg/bin:$PATH
$ export PKG_PATH=https://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/misc/nia/tigersrc/packages/All/

Add the last two lines to ~/.bash_profile.

Installing packages

Browse the repository


$ sudo pkg_admin findbest '*ffmpeg*'
https://cdn.NetBSD.org:443/pub/pkgsrc/misc/nia/tigersrc/packages/All/ffmpeg2-2.8.20nb16.tgz
$ sudo pkg_add ffmpeg2

Challenges building modern software on 10.4

Part of this project is just for fun. Since I'm a developer specialized in build systems, I get enjoyment out of pushing pkgsrc as far as possible. Therefore, others should get to learn from this too.

Refer to the mk.conf used for this repository, containing some non-upstreamed workarounds, and the allowlist of packages.

Compiler: XCode's GCC 4.0 does not support C++11 or C11. It defaults to C89. Some software expects the compiler to default to C99, and does not specify -std=c99 in CFLAGS. This should be worked around by setting FORCE_C_STD in pkgsrc. For some reason, many pieces of modern software like to specify a million unsupported -W and -Wno arguments to customize warnings. These can be stripped out with pkgsrc's BUILDLINK_TRANSFORM.
Linker: The strict Mach-O linker included in Tiger is quite different from what modern software expects (e.g. it does not support -shared), unless that software uses libtool to make shared libraries in a portable manner. pkgsrc has long had a policy of "libtoolization", patching software that builds with plain Makefiles to use libtool. BUILDLINK_TRANSFORM can also translate many GNU ELF-style linker arguments to be compatible with the Darwin linker. I also found the -m option (for making multiply-defined symbols into a warning instead of an error) useful.
Library: Now-ubiqitious functions are missing, including clock_gettime and strnlen. These can easily be substituted from either libnbcompat or macports-legacy-support.
Atomics: Some wide atomic instructions are missing from 32-bit PowerPC. This isn't a PowerPC or Darwin-specific problem, since it affects other 32-bit instruction sets like i486.
Rust: Even if it worked on this platform, build times would be completely unacceptable. We use the pre-Rust versions of software like py-cryptography, since pkgsrc makes this easy. Save the planet, keep writing C.
Locales: Certain UTF-8 file names fail to extract with bsdtar, with the UTF-8 sequences being detected as invalid. I haven't done much research into this yet, but it affects very few packages, such as the Icelandic aspell dictionary. This is probably not a bsdtar problem, since it works on NetBSD with the same tar version.
Toolchain bugs: There is a problem with signal.h that causes some software to fail to compile. This can be easily worked around by disabling the relevant type definitions by pre-defining macros in CFLAGS.
Kernel bugs: Sadly, kqueue does not work properly. kqueue support is nearly always optional in software, but sometimes the detection needs to be turned off for this OS version. GNU configure makes this easy, other build systems may vary.
Other curiosities: The default dashboard widgets and screensaver in 10.4 use a surprising amount of CPU time that could be better spent on GCC. They're easy to disable, though.

Updates

[2024-04-21] New packages: audio/moc benchmarks/bonnie++ benchmarks/dhrystone benchmarks/nbench benchmarks/sysbench benchmarks/ttcp benchmarks/whetstone editors/ce editors/jed editors/jove editors/le editors/ne editors/nvi editors/vim emulators/dosbox emulators/fceu emulators/gambatte mail/rss2email net/iftop net/netcat net/nsd net/unbound news/nn news/tin news/trn textproc/par www/ap2-fcgid www/ap2-perl www/cgit
[2024-03-30] Initial release