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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