I finally got debian sid working almost properly on this old iMac G4 (after much swearing, scratching of head, and re-compiling of kernel), so obviously the next thing was to see whether Ardour would work on there too…
… and there it is! Ardour 6.2 (from debian sid repository) running on a 2003-ish vintage iMac!
I can only get the screen working in greyscale, and there’s only 768MB of RAM, but I’m sure there must be some use for it…
fancy!
How’s audio I/O? Does it work reliably at reasonably low latency?
Have you tried to use it on MacOS 10.6 (the last official PPC version)? There are still Ardour nightlies for that platform. And you should also get a color screen.
https://x42-plugins.com/ also still have a universal binary to run there. For Cairo/GL I had to explicitly add some endiness conversion. It’s a crude bitflip, more like a proof of concept, that could be optimized if there’s actual interest:
I’ve really done nothing with Ardour on this machine beyond apt install ardour, accepting the defaults in Ardour’s’ Audio/MIDI Setup’, recording ten seconds through the internal microphone into a scratch session, and looking to see that the waveform appeared. At that point, I was surprised enough to find it working at all that I (a) posted it here, and (b) quit while I was ahead 
So I didn’t even try tweaking the latency, or using an external sound card. I think it may only be USB 1.1 anyway.
My intended use for this thing is really as a (cool-looking) xterm for the main studio machine, so that I can drive Ardour from the other side of the room. I did rather nerd-snipe myself into getting debian working on it, and I’m sure the right incantations in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ will eventually get me colours. I’m not sure whether it still even boots into OSX.
debian sid powerpc does have your x42-plugins in the repo, but whether they work or not I don’t know: I’ll check them out next time I have a spare moment at the studio.
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Well, nearly 6 years later, and I finally got this machine out of storage (where, sadly, it had to go when we moved out of the old studio, not long after I made the original post), and I’ve actually now got it working running debian, colour screen and all!
I’ve installed an unholy mix of debian 6 and debian sid: debian 6 was the last to ship the xserver-xorg-video-nv package that’s needed for the NVidia GeForce2 that’s in this machine, so after a basic install of sid, I added the ISO of debian 6.0.10 to the apt sources and installed xserver-xorg-video-nv from there, along with all the other old packages it pulled in.
As I suspected, it’s not really got the oomph to run anything useful locally. I installed Ardour 9.2 from the debian sid repo, and I was able to add four mono tracks with an x42-eq on each with a 2048 sample buffer before the DSP load hit 100%. However, running Ardour 8.12 on the main studio computer via ssh -Y works well (apart from LV2 plugin GUIs not showing): here it is!
Eventually it’ll go on top of the piano on the other side of the room, and it’ll save me having to walk across the room if I want to record some keyboards.
way cool !
I love such.
With machines of that kind, and i always get them for free, i often try if at least some smaller things like seq24 or ams (alsa modular synth, anything but easy for me) work. Often they do offer quite some fun, but not for something serious, just some short training sessions. I do like the “ok, lets see how far i might get approach”, but some people want things get done. I sure waste quite some time with such 
Perhaps if you poke around in the repos you might find something you could use on it (perhaps you did already, or simply don’t want, just saying ).
Thats just a side comment, i assume you even know that already, if in doubt ignore.
Really cool.
@n4dir: Thank you! Glad you appreciate it!
I pretty much have this machine doing what I want now (though I do still want to try to get to the bottom of why Ardour 9.4 doesn’t work via ssh -Y, while Ardour 8.12 does). I do have to admit that I really wanted to find some kind of use for it, just so that it could be something more than just an unusual ornament!, but you’re right, there are plenty of interesting things in the debian repo that could be fun to put on there, now that it’s working.
The only difference from Ardour 8. 12 to 9.x that I can think of would be touch-screen screen support, but that should not have any effect here.
I do use ssh -Y to test Ardour/ARM builds (the RPi here doesn’t have a screen connected).
Regarding LV2 UI support, I expect this is a problem due to missing openGL support.
VNC to the rescue.
How about just hard disk recorder (no plugins)?
Yut since this a 32bit machine, running Ardour > Ardour 7.0 will likely be unreliable (64bit atomics are not realtime safe), and 768MB isn’t much either. So yes follow @n4dir 's advice and install seq24, freewheelin or sth fun. If you can get GL working it’d also be a nice analyzer or loudness meter.
Anyway, it’s a pretty cool hack. Thanks for sharing!
