I watched the progress of porting FreeBSD to the Mac very closely during the last year. The progress has been steady and very promising. Peter Graham was the main force behind this effort. Last December he released a first mini-iso of FreeBSD-CURRENT that installed on a PowerPC. This ISO was updated in May. Now X.org and many ports are working and we are not far away from an official release.
In a recent interview on osnews.com, Scott Long from the release-engineering team mentioned that support for the PowerPC may be FreeBSD 6.0’s little secret.
This week the PowerPC project page on www.freebsd.org was updated to include the newest instructions and information. Peter’s installation instructions can be found ISO FreeSBIE project posted an article about installing FreeBSD 6-CURRENT on his Mac Mini. The steps are very similar to my OpenBSD 3.7 on a 17” PowerBook instructions but Dario used an external USB/Firewire disk to install to. Installing on the internal hard drive should not differ from my instructions. Beside writing on how to install FreeBSD Dario also posted that he was accepted to Goolge’s Summer of Code and that he will be working on integrating the FreeSBIE toolkit into FreeBSD.
I’m pleased to see the PowerPC support becoming more mature and I hope that 6.0 or 6.1 will feature a macppc version.
See also this wiki for more information.
UPDATE:
While speaking of FreeBSD. Some important security fixes for a TCP vulnerability, a bzip2 and a ipfw vulnerability were released minutes ago. See http://www.freebsd.org/security.
