A few years ago, I was given an old iMac G4 by my sister. Her family weren't using it and I had an idea for a photo slideshow machine that would sit on a bookcase and cycle through family photos. I like the look of the iMac series; they are pretty machines that aren't out of place as a piece of decoration.

As well, I had wanted to try one of the BSDs for quite a while. Up to then, I'd only run Linux and I thought I had earned my unix chops by running Slackware without any problems. I did some research and eventually settled on NetBSD. One of NetBSD's philosophies is that it will run on almost anything and, since I had no Mac experience, and the iMac G4 was one of NetBSD's supported architectures, I took the plunge and installed it.

NetBSD

It wasn't too hard, but the documentation was very confusing. The install document confusingly chops and changes between the Open Firmware versions and I was totally new to Open Firmware (which is sort of an interactive combination of BIOS and boot manager written in Forth) anyway. I must have read it a dozen times. Plus you had to leave an HFS partition for the boot loader and I seem to remember you had to partition the disk before the install using a separate utility, which meant you had to choose partition sizes before knowing anything about the OS. I eventually muddled through it, the install went ok and I was up and running.

Fast forward to six months ago, I was upgrading something and somehow broke X. Since the purpose of the machine was to act as a standalone photo displayer, a broken X was not good. The mailing lists seemed to hint that, yes, there was a bug and it would be fixed. But bug fixes take a while and I didn't want to wait 6 or whatever months.

I don't mean any criticism of the NetBSD's mac port maintainers, but I get the impression it is only a couple of people trying hard with very limited resources. It gives the impression it is slowly dying.

By this stage, I wouldn't say I was disenchanted with NetBSD, but I was finding it difficult. The ports system (source packages to compile yourself) was tricky to manage. It looked as though I could only fix X by uninstalling it and installing it again.

If I had to do that, I might as well look at another BSD too. Serendipitously, just as I am thinking that, a poster on Hacker News mentioned OpenBSD. It prompted me to take another look at Open BSD. I liked OpenBSD's philosophy of "it just works", and the iMac was on the list of the supported architecture.

OpenBSD

First the install: It Just Worked. The docs are a model of clarity, especially the install and post-install process. After burning a boot disk, I had an up-and-running system in about 20 minutes. Extraordinarily simple.

The install process itself was just a matter of answering a series of about a dozen questions. The only tricky one was how to partition the drive, but it suggested sane defaults so, after reading the docs, I chose those. Then it was answering yes or no for a few common daemons, setting up a network, a user, and a couple of other things, and that was it. Reboot into the new system, good to go.

The ports system is wonderfully easy. Cd into the directory for the package you want, and type make install. That's it. Dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed first, then the package.

Heh, the first package I built needed gmake, which needed gettext, which needed... etc. So the first package build took about two hours on a 800 MHz processor, but now all those common dependencies are done and won't need to be built again.

Overall, I am super-impressed. The man pages are detailed (OpenBSD is specific about the man pages being the system documentation so they make documentation bugs as important as software bugs), the install instructions are clear, and it just works.

Side Benefit

OpenBSD takes bug-fixes and security seriously (although there is criticism of their approach), and one of the side effects is that it lags other OSes in the support for the latest hardware and in software design. For example, the filesystem doesn't support journalling, although OpenBSD claims it is not needed, nor does it support an encrypted boot filesystem.

However, an often-overlooked benefit of using an OS that is conservative in its approach is that it continues to support older hardware, simply because it did so in the past and there is no need to drop it because of pressure on developers to move on.

Conclusion

OpenBSD on the iMac G4 is seamless and easy. I might have been spoilt because I had already tried a BSD and therefore had some experience of Open Firmware and BSD-style partitioning, but I had no problems at all. The iMac is back to serving up nice photos on the top of my bookshelf.