So I have been getting into Mac OS alternatives for PowerPC again lately and after playing around with Void Linux on my PowerBook G4 and iBook G3 (they both ran it amazingly and everything is supported) I heard about FreeBSD. It sounded promising as it had more software for PowerPC and was still being maintained, also from what I heard it was faster than Linux. I decided to try it on iBook G3. This wasn't the first time I installed it though, that would be all the way back in 2020 when I was first getting into Unix as a whole. Back then I tried it in a WM and it seemed fine but it didn't play nice with the VM. It's not the second time either - that would be last year when I tried it on my 2004 Power Mac G5. That went horribly however because there was a huge issue with the ATI Radeon 9600 in it - the output would be fine for like 20 seconds and then it would freeze and become completely unresponsive for minutes at a time. It was basically unusable and nothing I tried fixed this problem. SSHing into the machine was fine and everything worked but any video output from the Radeon would be affected.
That bring us to now: the 2001 500 MHz iBook G3.
I downloaded the Release 13.2 DVD iso and burned it to a disc. The installation was fine and everything went smoothly. Post install was also mostly fine - I installed xorg and the appropriate driver for the Rage 128. I started it for the first time with the "startx" command and.... nothing. All I got was a blank screen with an unblinking white cursor at the top left. I thought it was broken so I tried configuring it manually but that just resulted in several errors when starting it again. I decided to delete the config files that I made and let X do it automatically. And well.. it worked! It wasn't an issue with Xorg or anything - I was too impatient and just had to wait for a while before it started. Installing CTWM, xterm and some more simple packages went fine, but this is where it starts to go wrong. First, the touchpad wasn't working at all. I tried everything I could but it just did not want to work. Sound also didn't and after troubleshooting for several hours, I couldn't get it to work. Well, whatever I would deal with them later (or so I thought). I started compiling some packages from the sources but after a while random graphical glitches started appearing - very fast static-like lines would appear all over the screen. Now, the later G3s suffered from graphical issues from overheating so I was worried mine was starting to do the same even though it's an early model that should be unaffected so I stopped it.
Then I booted it up later again and what do I find? FreeBSD does not want to boot, it just sends me to the Open Firmware console. The installation seems to have had bricked itself.
I'm gonna take a break from this now. Keep in mind this doesn't mean that I hate the OS, I might give it a try sometime in the future and maybe on a different machine but for now no more BSDs for me.
