G5 upgrade possibilities

[BarnacleGrim]

I'm hooked on high-end workstations, IIfx, Quadra, SGI, Sun, etc. and I love my 1st generation PowerMac G5. Because I'm not made of money, and I'm not an Intel fan (complex instruction set computers in this day and age?) I'm not getting a Mac Pro. And the only times it really beachballs on me is operator error, having too much flash-littered browser windows open at once.

Installing more memory would be a no-brainer. 1 GB should be plenty for most purposes, but with photography I guess more memory is always good. I also installed a 500 GB hard drive some time ago, I'm thinking of removing the old 160 GB drive and put in another 500 GB one as a RAID-1. I still haven't learned the lesson of regular backups after all these years and all that lost data. The 160 gig could be recycled with a FireWire interface for backing up essentials on the MacBook.

What about thin clients? I'm spending months on ships with deafening ventilation fans. You don't know what shore leave is until you have gotten in your car and driven miles into the wilderness just to sit down on the stub enjoying the silence (until you realize your ears are ringing). It would be very cool if I could keep my G5 in the basement and run a gigabit cable up to the study and only have the monitor, keyboard, mouse and a CF reader. Not sure how practical it is, though.

 

[johnklos]

To cure the beachballs, install http://www.clicktoflash.com/. You'll wish you had installed it ages ago.

Memory is cheap, and 1 gig is hardly all that much for photography related things. Two 1 gig DIMMs costs about $70 USD these days, and it'll save your hard drive some wear.

If you're not already running 10.5, then upgrading to 10.5 would give you Time Machine, but regardless moving to two 500 gig mirrored drives is always a good idea. We're an Apple value added reseller where I work, and we configure all towers to have mirrored system drives. Even our old dual and quad G5s have mirrored 2 TB drives.

I have yet to see an adequate thin client solution. It'd probably be easier to get a really long digital video cable and a USB 1 extender (you might be able to find a decent USB 2 extender, but the ones I've seen have been pretty flaky). Straight DVI cables don't extend very long, but if you get a long HDMI cable with an HDMI to DVI adapter on each end, you can go very far. I've used cables up to 100' without problems.

 

[abbub]

Does 10.5 run well on a G5? I have a first gen dual 2.0 with 3 GB of RAM that I'm running Tiger on, because I've heard that it likes the G5 better than Leopard. (I have Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro, so I don't feel compelled to upgrade just to have the latest and greatest.)

 

[johnklos]

Does 10.5 run well on a G5? I have a first gen dual 2.0 with 3 GB of RAM that I'm running Tiger on, because I've heard that it likes the G5 better than Leopard. (I have Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro, so I don't feel compelled to upgrade just to have the latest and greatest.)

There are lots of opinions regarding this, but in my personal experience each new version of the OS has seemed more responsive than the last. I run 10.5 primarily because it runs more software and secondarily because it feels more responsive. In certain things, such as system overhead when running Compressor, 10.5 is definitely better than 10.4, but I suppose most people don't max out all of their CPUs very often. Perhaps the most common way would be via Handbrake, but even the newest version of that doesn't run on 10.4.

My thought is that memory is cheap, so as long as you have plenty of memory, always run the latest OS.

I do still have 10.4 (Server) on a tray-loading iMac G3 with G4 card, but I keep that mostly because it's cool (the motherboard is built into a Tonka truck) and because it was my primary machine for many years. I'd love to be able to run 10.5 on it...

 

[abbub]

Yeah, I've got a (heavily) upgraded Sawtooth running 10.4 and OS 9, so I won't lose that Tiger feeling completely if I move the G5 over to Leopard.

 

[~Coxy]

10.5 seemed no worse than 10.4 on my dual core G5, at the time. It might even work out faster now that 10.5 is more mature.

My rule of thumb is 10.4 for G4s and 10.5 for G5s and 10.6 for G6s. :beige:

 

[abbub]

Hrm. Maybe I'll drop leopard on it this weekend, if I can find the time.

 

[Paralel]

Leopard flies on the Dual 1.25 G4 i installed it on.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

So far on my computer shopping list:

2 GB RAM upgrade

500 GB disk for mirroring

Mac OS 10.5

CF card reader

I used to complain about the 64 MB video card that shipped with the machine, but I really don't have time to play games any more. An extra monitor would be cool, but unless I can find another LaCie photon20vision somewhere I'm not going to bother.

 

[Cory5412]

As far as using a G5 to host thin clients, there are two potential solutions:

1: renounce all desire to ever touch or use or think about any software you couldn't run on linux, and then set up X11 and use a normal X11 display terminal, like you might on an SGI or Sun system. An alternate version of this option is just to turn off the Mac and actually use an SGI or Sun or linux/bsd system with one of those types of devices. (HP Envizex is an X11 client that I can remember off the top of my head, there are others.) (Although I imagine this isn't what you'd had in mind... [] ]'&gt

2: VNC, which isn't really that great, requires huge network bandwidth and still is kind of terrible, but a VNC server is built into OS X. A device like the decTOP or most of the thin clients from WYSE and HP should hypothetically be able to do VNC. At absolute worst, an atom-based nettop running Windows XP would do the job. However, unlike RDP and X11, there's a huuuuge quality and experience loss when you're using VNC.

There's this company that built an RDP server for OS X, with the intent that you could hook the SunRay Windows Connector into a farm of xserves running their RDP product, and have a realistic mac thin client set up. However, my understanding is that their product is somewhat terrible, and that it's extremely expensive to license, more than it'd cost to get proper terminal services licensing for Windows, based on what the web site looks like.

Also, the university here has 10.5 on a few G5s (well, we've got one left, the others were replaced by mac minis) and it looks good. I don't know how much ram ours have, but my recommendation is always to put as much memory as a computer can reasonably handle in it. If I had a G5, I'd probably be working on maxing it out before DDR1 (or DDR2 for newer G5s) got too much more expensive than DDR3 currently is.

 

[register]

Leopard lacks Classic support. Get an external drive, setup Leopard and use the migration assistant to get your preferred configuration to Leopard (it will cost some time, but no worries). Afterwards check what still works and decide for yourself. Leopard and Tiger both have pros and cons, why I use a dual boot configuration on my Titanium PowerBook.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

I'm still trying to configure Tiger just the way I like it :

While I don't use Classic for anything useful any more it's still nice to have around for nostalgic purposes. But I would actually be better off running OS 9 natively on my PowerBook G3. If only I can find its power cord. The other thing I'm losing is AppleTalk, but I guess that only means I have to create shortcuts for my AppleShare IP servers, which at the present is just my 7600.

One thing about RAID-1 is that any mistake I make is mirrored on the other drive. It only protects the data against a disk crash. I tried looking up TimeMachine, they talk about external hard drives, shouldn't it work just as well with an internal one, with much less cost and desktop clutter?

 

[register]

Time machine works with internal drives as well as with external ones. In case you need to have your data secure from loss, consider to use an external drive to store backup data in a location separate from your workstation. A second disk drive inside the computer for backup purposes is a very good attempt, however.

 

[Cory5412]

Time machine with a second internal disk would be good, especially given the capabilities and overall purpose of time machine.

If you could swing it, I'd do 500gb boot+data disk, 750gb or 1tb time machine disk, and a 500gb external disk to keep a weekly or monthly superduper or carboncopycloner image of the boot disk.

This way, you have both a complete configuration you can go back to, as well as up to the moment updates on your user data.

 

[Paralel]

That would be a good reason to install another drive into my MDD, use it as a Time Machine drive in case I screw anything up (which is very possible since my familiarity with Leopard is only so-so). Apple was def. onto something with its 4 internal HD idea.