What to do with a Power Mac G5?

[Bunsen]

Anyway, back to the question at hand:

I've tried running it as a server, but the network transfer speeds were much to slow (HD maybe?). What would you suggest?

What were you serving? Was this for home file storage, or webserving, or something else?

I've seen it written elsewhere that OS X (or microkernel OSes in general) is just not a very efficient server OS. You may like to compare performance with a *BSD or Linux - especially if you can find a G5-optimized build (or build one from source, if you're feeling masochistic). ClassicHasClass may have suggestions here.

This is an experiment that would cost you $0 to try out (not counting time) if you already have disk space for it. A small second drive to install the OS, correctly configured, should be able to read & serve files from your existing OS X volume/s.

For a home file storage server, this is probably less of an issue, and I would suggest looking at things like keeping your disk regularly repaired and defragmented and not overly full (rule of thumb at least 10% free space), keeping your OS and files on physically separate disks (or at least separate volumes), keeping your OS updated, maxing out the RAM, debugging your network setup, and lastly, possibly a faster hard drive and/or faster hard drive PCI/x/e controller card. The last item would open up the possibility of a RAID for even faster HD performance and/or realtime backups.

However, in the interests of your electricity bill, for a machine that has to be on 24/7, there is certainly a lot to be said for a cheap dual-Atom board running a free OS.

 

[Gorgonops]

However, in the interests of your electricity bill, for a machine that has to be on 24/7, there is certainly a lot to be said for a cheap dual-Atom board running a free OS.

Heh. I suppose you could say that about any fire-breathing workstation computer. I made the mistake of leaving my first-gen Mac Pro powered on all of January and February and it materially affected my power bill.

Again getting back to the original question/to recap, for the most part we could all agree on the following with regards to a G5: A Power Mac G5 is a physically impressive but flawed computer, which (by many measures) hasn't aged that well, all arguments about how good/bad it was when it was new aside. If you have one that's no longer your main computer the best uses for it are probably, in descending order:

A: Use it to run era-appropriate PowerPC-only-binary productivity software, IE, old copies of Photoshop/Final Cut Pro/whatever. This assumes that you own the licenses to said software, have a genuine use for them (be it artistic/educational/whatever), and they run better on the G5 than anything else you have. An original 1.6Ghz G5 desktop makes an unusually iffy case for this since those machines are not much/any faster at many things than late-model G4 towers, and G4 towers usually support a broader range of older software. (Including in most cases the ability to run stuff that requires booting natively into OS 9.)

B: Use it to "experiment". If you have an interest in running oddball hardware/OS combinations a G5 offers a few possibilities, including Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD at a minimum. The first two OSes on that list include the option of running fully 64 bit kernels, which no G5-supporting OS X can do, so if you really want to pretend your old G5 is an "exotic workstation" that's your best bet. (This is what I'd use a G5 for if someone shoved one in my face. But in all honesty I suspect once I'd finished with the initial "get it all working" marathon session I'd probably power it on to play with roughly as often as I do my NetBSD-running Sun Ultra 10, which is "not often".) Or you could install an old version of Xcode and program it. How this is better than using a new machine if you're trying to develop for OS X I'm not sure, but if you're wanting to learn more about IBM's version of the PowerPC architecture you could do worse. (Although if you're fixated on getting a job at IBM I'd probably say switch the sucker to Linux before starting.)

C: Sell/give it to someone that wants to use it for A, B, or D. Depending on the audience/venue you should be able to get a few sawbucks for it.

D: Use it as a server, either with OS X or something from category B. There's really no arguing here: objectively the G5 isn't a very good choice for this. It's big, it's noisy, it sucks a lot of power, and for its size it offers a positively *miserable* amounts of room internally for storage devices. (That huge and *two* drive bays? Really?) But it's something it's capable of doing with the right software, just like any old computer. (Count me as also curious what you were trying to serve with it that was "slow". The G5 is fairly fast when it comes bus/memory/HD interfaces and while OS X fails badly when it comes to scaling with multiple threads it *should* be okay for just about any home use.)

F: "Hand it down" to someone to use as their main computer. Someone here has made it clear how offended they get when it's suggested this isn't a good use for it, but facts are facts. A single G5 tower might perform as well or better as a crusty old Pentium 4 on things that both can run, but the crusty old Pentium 4 will run any number of currently supported OSes, web browsers, and plugins, and thus won't subject its user to the gauntlet of having to use a million little workarounds for things that the software no longer exists for on the G5. Like it or not all PowerPC Macs are now essentially in the same category as Commodore Amigas, and while it's admirable that folks like ClassicHasClass are giving their time towards supporting people in the "Mac-orphan" community you sort of need to be *in* that community and believe in the cause to appreciate it. Shoving a G5 at someone who just wants to email the grandkids, watch YouTube, and play Farmville is a recipe for frustration when computers that will do those things adequately without giving the user the software runaround are basically a dime a dozen.

Note that "Gut it and stuff an Intel motherboard in it" isn't on the list; it not being included isn't because doing so would be some sort of mortal sin but because the OP's original question appears to have been framed as "what would I use a G5 CPU equipped machine for?". It's no longer a G5 if you do that. I suppose if you were really thinking outside the box there's a million other uses, like "dam a drainage ditch with it" or "keep your dead cats in it", but since they also involve using the machine in such a way that the G5 CPU isn't specifically leveraged I'd say they're probably off-topic for this thread.

Does anyone else have a suggestion which *does* use the G5 CPU that doesn't fit into categories A-F?

 

[agg23]

As per the file serving being fairly slow, I've tried it running Tiger, Leopard, and Leopard Server (the latter for trying Time Machine backups). Transfer speeds were slower than transfers to my junky PC laptop's USB HD (which is connected with USB 2.0), so I would have to guess that the HD in the G5 is the issue (transfers were tested over both AFP and Samba).

I'll probably just set it up with NetBSD or a linux distro (Debian based) and Tiger/Leopard with Photoshop 6 or 7 (can't remember which one I own for PPC). Maybe I'll try to find a cheap copy of Logic too.

 

[ianj]

Remember that Photoshop only ran in OS X starting with version 7, if you're going to set out to acquire a copy.

 

[agg23]

Then I must have Photoshop 7 because it runs in OS X.

 

[Bunsen]

Logic is probably not a bad thought; it's likely to run rather nicely on that machine. Heck, get an old disk of iLife PPC and throw Garageband on there. Plus with Firewire, USB and PCI you have a wide range of obsolete (ie, cheap) and modern add-ons available for better audio I/O, hardware MIDI control and extra DSP grunt to run effects and synths.

There are also a number of nice open source audio projects that run on *nix, should you choose to go that route.

However, if you want to have another crack at using it as a server, I would suggest doing the small tune-ups (and later/optionally, upgrades - disk, RAM) I suggested way back up there.

Incidentally, my daily driver is a G4

 

[ianj]

Another thing to be said for running *BSD on your G5 instead of Mac OS X is that you'll be getting a current OS with security updates and a high likelihood of continued support moving forward. A similar situation this reminds me of is in Sun hardware, which switched from the 32-bit sun4m architechture to 64-bit UltraSPARC in 1995. Solaris dropped support for the legacy 32-bit platform ten years later, but both OpenBSD and NetBSD fully support it to this day and will probably continue to do so. It could be argued that the G5 is a Mac and therefore not running OS X makes its very existence pointless (which I've said before in other contexts), but as a Mac the G5 is an orphan. As a generic UNIX machine it can be a first-class citizen for years to come.

 

[agg23]

And of what particular purpose is a general use UNIX machine? I've always been a Linux and OS X user. The only UNIX experience I have is from OS X. What would I get (end user) that I don't get in OS X? Yes, I am a developer and very technically minded, but I've never seen the use for a pure UNIX shell on machines that are capable of more. Am I misinterpreting something?

 

[Gorgonops]

Am I misinterpreting something?

Maybe, but I doubt it's important.

Some people like to make a distinction between operating systems that are directly descended from historical PDP-11/VAX UNIX code (like Free/Net/OpenBSD) and operating systems that grew out of cloning said code, IE, Linux (more properly, the OS that results from combining a Linux kernel with a userland that's a mix of old BSD-licensed software and differently-licensed clones of it.), calling one "Unix" and the other not. Religious arguments aside (and believe me there are fanatic nutballs that get *really wound up* over this distinction) except for a few edge cases there is no practical difference between what you can do with a machine that has Linux installed and one that has Free/Net/OpenBSD installed instead.

(From a legal standpoint you're only *really* allowed to call your OS "Unix" if you're paying a certification fee to The Open Group, who own the trademark. Said group actually sued Apple for calling OS X "Unix" in their advertising in 2003 and Apple gave in and coughed up the license fee to certify OS X Leopard in 2007. None of the "Free" BSDs are licensed by the Open Group despite them all having a better claim on being called "UNIX" than OS X, and thus if you look at their websites you'll find that they advertise themselves as "Unix-like" or "derived from BSD UNIX", not *as UNIX*.)

If you're already comfortable with Debian Linux there's no good reason I can think of to install a BSD instead unless you specifically want to see what it's like. I would hazard a guess that of the two Linux is *probably* going to be better supported/more stable on the G5 than BSD since Linux was/is a mainstream OS choice for POWER-based hardware while BSD really isn't. (In some trailing-edge/obscure cases, like Motorola 68k-based hardware, some of the BSD's like NetBSD may be the better/more stable choice.)

 

[ianj]

I mentioned the BSDs specifically just to relate the story of 32-bit SPARC machines being supported by them long after Sun stopped doing so. There was no intention of suggesting that Linux would not work equally well, nor was any Linux vs. BSD partisanship involved. I use the term "generic UNIX" to refer to operating systems like the BSDs that trace directly back to the original AT&T UNIX, but are not the product of a proprietary vendor that pays the Open Group for permission to call them "UNIX." It's a term of convenience that I perhaps should have put into context.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "pure UNIX shell," though. Proprietary UNIX platforms like Solaris, AIX and HP/UX, as well as the free ones like *BSD, run all the same desktop software that Linux does, and from a non-technical user's perspective the experience is essentially the same. There is no reason why you would be limited to only a command-line shell simply because you were using UNIX instead of Linux.

 

[agg23]

I think I'm going to install Ubuntu 10.10 on there and see what I can do with it.

Kind of off topic, but my CRT has recently started acting weird. After running for so long it starts to visibly scan (see the video here if you don't know what I mean). Does this mean the caps are going bad or what? This is my only VGA CRT (I do have a LCD with VGA, but it needs to stay where it is), so I'd like to keep it up and running (as long as it doesn't take too much effort).

 

[uniserver]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cybernet-Model-LCD2001-15-LCD-Monitor-w-Power-Supply-VGA-Cable-/220999677723?pt=Computer_Monitors&hash=item33749b771b#ht_1579wt_1111

vga lcd, 15 bucks

 

[Gorgonops]

There was no intention of suggesting that Linux would not work equally well, nor was any Linux vs. BSD partisanship involved.

Sorry, no offence intended, IE, didn't mean to suggest you were one of the "fanatic nutballs" because of your specific usage of the term. (I have of course dealt with people who do seem to think they're scoring points for BSD by saying it's "real UNIX, unlike Linux", but that's amusingly pathetic in light of how the recursive acronym "GNU" expands to "GNU is Not Unix" anyway.) It's just at this point the distinction is sort of moot, since there has been about twenty years' worth of water under the bridge since Linux was born and BSD escaped from academia respectively. These days there's a Debian distribution that runs with a FreeBSD kernel, Slackware Linux's init system probably looks more like 1989-era BSD than any of the current xBSD's do, the current incarnation of MINIX, which isn't Linux *or* BSD in the kernel, is using NetBSD's source for its base libraries and tools... the lines are very blurry. And "real" commercial UNIXes (which are officially AT&T flavoured but themselves carry varying amounts of BSD DNA along with them) have diverged so much from each other and their Berkeley cousins that moving from one to another, like from Solaris to AIX, is probably more jarring than moving from a Linux distribution like Debian to FreeBSD or vice-versa. If there's such a thing as "Generic Unix" in 2012 it probably *is* a Linux distribution, or at least the term could be used to describe any OS that provides an environment similar to that provided by a mainline Linux distribution. (Most of which approximate a generic-ish "SysV+BSD pieces" commercial UNIX like Solaris somewhat more closely than the BSDs do.)

Anyway, enough hair-splitting. Whee.

 

[Cory5412]

certify OS X Leopard in 2007

But only on Intel.

And of what particular purpose is a general use UNIX machine?

The same as linux, in a lot of ways.

What would I get (end user) that I don't get in OS X?

Updated userland, regularly scheduled and ad-hoc security patches, and more flexibility than OS X offers in terms of window management and what services you want to run. In a *bsd (or linux) you can choose not to run a window manager at all, which may be of help to somebody who has a serial console (and an xserve which has a serial console port) and just wants to run it as a remotely administered, console-only computer. I do a very similar thing (but with linux), remotely, using SliceHost.

I have actually been thinking about running such a local machine (sans GUI) for local productivity tasks such as having a copy of all my various inboxes in Alpine (I probably have a few gigs of email between the accounts I'd hook up), using ttytter, and syncing my dropbox so I can use vim/nano/whatever to do writing, when I'm not in the mood for Notepad++ on Windows or PlainText on my iPad.

Plus, such a machine (or VM on my big server) would be a useful test environment for things like "will all of my wikis break when I upgrade from PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.3?" (protip: they will.)

Having all of that on a separate, physical machine (such as a G5 if you can swing the electricity costs, new disks and a reasonable amount of ram for it) or even some other non-x86 platform is mainly valuable if you can deal with the platform differences, and you want it set up that way for a specific interest in the machine.

But that's if you want to use it as a server or console productivity machine (in which case I'd pull the graphics card too, if it'll boot up without it.) If you're interested in graphical productivity, Mac OS X is going to be your best bet on Mac hardware. It'll run all the apps it did when it was new, and as a few people suggested, you may be able to find old versions of some content creation apps on eBay, and in a lot of cases people will say that learning on those older versions of apps can be a valuable experience. (I would find it to be annoying unless there was a particular version of app for while a veritable boatload of training material had been developed, and you already had that training material.)

 

[ClassicHasClass]

using ttytter

Ooooh. |)