What to do with a Power Mac G5?

[uniserver]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cybernet-Model- ... 579wt_1111

vga lcd, 15 bucks

[Gorgonops]

There was no intention of suggesting that Linux would not work equally well, nor was any Linux vs. BSD partisanship involved.

Sorry, no offence intended, IE, didn't mean to suggest you were one of the "fanatic nutballs" because of your specific usage of the term. (I have of course dealt with people who do seem to think they're scoring points for BSD by saying it's "real UNIX, unlike Linux", but that's amusingly pathetic in light of how the recursive acronym "GNU" expands to "GNU is Not Unix" anyway.) It's just at this point the distinction is sort of moot, since there has been about twenty years' worth of water under the bridge since Linux was born and BSD escaped from academia respectively. These days there's a Debian distribution that runs with a FreeBSD kernel, Slackware Linux's init system probably looks more like 1989-era BSD than any of the current xBSD's do, the current incarnation of MINIX, which isn't Linux *or* BSD in the kernel, is using NetBSD's source for its base libraries and tools... the lines are very blurry. And "real" commercial UNIXes (which are officially AT&T flavoured but themselves carry varying amounts of BSD DNA along with them) have diverged so much from each other and their Berkeley cousins that moving from one to another, like from Solaris to AIX, is probably more jarring than moving from a Linux distribution like Debian to FreeBSD or vice-versa. If there's such a thing as "Generic Unix" in 2012 it probably *is* a Linux distribution, or at least the term could be used to describe any OS that provides an environment similar to that provided by a mainline Linux distribution. (Most of which approximate a generic-ish "SysV+BSD pieces" commercial UNIX like Solaris somewhat more closely than the BSDs do.)

Anyway, enough hair-splitting. Whee.

[Cory5412]

certify OS X Leopard in 2007

But only on Intel.

And of what particular purpose is a general use UNIX machine?

The same as linux, in a lot of ways.

What would I get (end user) that I don't get in OS X?

Updated userland, regularly scheduled and ad-hoc security patches, and more flexibility than OS X offers in terms of window management and what services you want to run. In a *bsd (or linux) you can choose not to run a window manager at all, which may be of help to somebody who has a serial console (and an xserve which has a serial console port) and just wants to run it as a remotely administered, console-only computer. I do a very similar thing (but with linux), remotely, using SliceHost.

I have actually been thinking about running such a local machine (sans GUI) for local productivity tasks such as having a copy of all my various inboxes in Alpine (I probably have a few gigs of email between the accounts I'd hook up), using ttytter, and syncing my dropbox so I can use vim/nano/whatever to do writing, when I'm not in the mood for Notepad++ on Windows or PlainText on my iPad.

Plus, such a machine (or VM on my big server) would be a useful test environment for things like "will all of my wikis break when I upgrade from PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.3?" (protip: they will.)

Having all of that on a separate, physical machine (such as a G5 if you can swing the electricity costs, new disks and a reasonable amount of ram for it) or even some other non-x86 platform is mainly valuable if you can deal with the platform differences, and you want it set up that way for a specific interest in the machine.

But that's if you want to use it as a server or console productivity machine (in which case I'd pull the graphics card too, if it'll boot up without it.) If you're interested in graphical productivity, Mac OS X is going to be your best bet on Mac hardware. It'll run all the apps it did when it was new, and as a few people suggested, you may be able to find old versions of some content creation apps on eBay, and in a lot of cases people will say that learning on those older versions of apps can be a valuable experience. (I would find it to be annoying unless there was a particular version of app for while a veritable boatload of training material had been developed, and you already had that training material.)

[ClassicHasClass]

using ttytter

Ooooh.