I finally got myself together and dug into layers of dusty and antiquated computer peripherals to get rid of old stuff and reclaim some space in the home office. I found kilometers of unused FireWire cables, USB extenders, various screws for hard disks, two EyeTV boxes I didn’t know I owned, four remote controls, and so on. An old Mac mini resurfaced, a 1.25 GHz PowerPC powered mini with 512 MB RAM and 40 GB HD. Not very impressing these days. Instead of throwing it away, the good friends at 99mac talked me into turning the mini into a server. Good idea. But since Apple has let down the Java community and doesn’t provide Java 1.6 for anything but 64-bit Intels, a Mac OS X based server was out of the question. After all, Java 1.7 is around the corner so why settle for old stuff like 1.5.

So I decided to see what the Linux world had to offer. After googling about for some time I decided on Ubuntu, which has community versions of latest version (or almost) built for PowerPC. So I downloaded an ISO with the GUI-free server version from here, made a disc with Toast, booted the mini from it and answered some questions. Surprise: my Swedish keyboard is supported (sans the dollar sign which I haven’t found yet)! I completed the installation with

sudo apt-get install unzip

to get a nice unpacker and then went on with openssh-server and openjdk-6-jre. On a USB stick I had the new and cute SpringSource dm server but didn’t know how to mount a USB stick. Google comes rescue:

cat /proc/partitions

revealed that my stick turned up under sda1 so I edited /etc/fstab and added a line (the spaces should be tabs)

/dev/sda1            /media/usbstick      auto       auto,user 

mounted the stick with

mount /media/usbstick

(all commands as su of course). After copying my zip with the SpringSource server and unzipping it under /opt I fired it up and waited. And waited. And waited. How depressing, it took almost 7 minutes to start the server! Did some more googling and learned that only IBMs Java will do if you want an efficient Java implementation. There’s surprisingly little information on how to get this rolling on Ubuntu, but I finally stumbled on medibuntu which has a fresh package for ppc. I followed Medibuntu’s instructions to add their repository and then installed IBM Java 1.6 with

sudo apt-get install ibm-j2sdk-1.6

I found that one also need to install libstdc++5, othewise it won’t run. Then it was easy to select the new Java installation with

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and do a quick test with java -version to verify that the proper Java was now in charge. Indeed:

java version "1.6.0"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build pxp3260-20071123_01)
IBM J9 VM (build 2.4, J2RE 1.6.0 IBM J9 2.4 Linux ppc-32
jvmxp3260-20071121_15015 (JIT enabled)
J9VM - 20071121_015015_bHdSMR
JIT  - r9_20071121_1330
GC   - 20071031_AA)
JCL  - 20071118_01

And with the help the JIT the SpringSource server now boots 7 times faster. Hooray, my dusty old Mac mini is now a decent server!

Now a USB stick is great for many things, but mounting and unmountning through the terminal is boring. The excellent ExpanDrive is just perfect for moving things between my no longer so little mini and my MacBook Pro. Best spent 29 US$ ever!