I just glommed onto the last of the PowerPC Mac marketted, on eBay. I'm sure it'll need a lot of work just to make it functional, such as rebuilding the liquid cooler without a coolant that's corrosive.

It's actually the first Mac to come with PCIe, which uniquely positions it in computing history.

But I want to integrate it into my existing computing infrastructure, which requires a SAS HBA and a SFP network adapter.

These Macs came with four PCIe gen1 slots. All x16 physical. The bottom is x16 electrical, and is occupied with an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GPU with two DVI ports. The remaining slots, from bottom to top, are x8 (2 GB/s) and two(2) x4 (1 GB/s). The hard drive subsystem is also SATA 1 (150 MB/s). It comes with (I think) the original 250 GB hard drive.

There's a FibreChannel card available from Apple, but I don't use FC. I use SAS. I prefer 12 Gbps SAS-3, which the gen1 x8 slot could technicly do, but where would I find a SAS3/PCIe1 card that the PowerPC OpenFirmware system could talk to?

Likewise, I prefer 10 Gbps fiber ethernet in my network, but the remaining slots top out at 8 Gbps. But, if there's a SFP ethernet PCIe card out there that can auto-downshift to gen1 speed, I'll take it, but again, there's the question of PowerPC OpenFirmware compatibility.

Anyone have any advice on this wild goose chase I've started?

If I have to settle for SAS2 (6 Gbps) and/or 5Gbps Ethernet, I'll not be complaining, but I don't know this platform's quirks with regard to PCIe card compatibility.


Zap fellow linuxers on apple hw

Moved from fedora to slackware, did write a small how to. Was straight forward.

Install, fix wifi, add audio, add touchar, reboot.

All good, no systemd so life is simple now :D

https://inku.bot.nu/posts/slackware-current-macbookpro-2017/

I have a 2019 16" MacBook Pro with 64 gigs of RAM, Core i9-9980HK (8 cores/16threads) a 512 SSD, and a Radeon 5600 with 8 gigs of VRAM. When I bought it in early 2020, it was a screaming demon. And now macOS just sucks on it. Has anyone gotten Omarchy to run on this? Has an Apple T2 chip.

I keep getting drawn into the allure of Omarchy and it has left me wanton. My user experience was so bad on my MBP I pulled out my old Thinkpad T450s with Fedora KDE and have been using that as my on the go computer.

Are there any Reports/Experiences if the Touchbar works under Linux on the MacBook 13" (2020)?