Slashdot Mirror
What To Do With an Old G5 Tower?
lunatic1969 writes "I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around. My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?"
Use it as supposed motivation for a contrived AskSlashdot entry where you spin a tragic tale of brain injury that finds you without ability to use Google or your own creative faculties to come up with a use for hardware that, while eliciting a strong emotional response from some of the community's more lonely members, is likely less valuable than the electricity you will spend running it for a year.
Who is trolling? You have to be a total sucker to run a G5 unless you own it already, and even then it's probably not the best answer unless it's already part of your workflow, which is clearly NOT the case here. For probably no more money than what you have to pay for them used you can build a PC that will kick the shit out of them, and consume less power in the bargain. And of course, it won't run the latest OSX and nobody (statistically) is making new PPC apps. Having personally spent a lot of time behind the keyboard of a Dual G5 I know intimately that the versions of OSX that will run on it are total garbage, and that it's big, loud, and hot. I'd bet money that whoever modded me down has never even used one, and probably never seen one in operation.
I guess I must have run across the iFanboy Mafia. Who still gives those iToolbags modpoints?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"