Leopard on a Sawtooth G4?

[quinterro]

I was setting up my Dual Sawtooth G4/450 again and currently have MacOS 9.2.2/10.4.11 on it. Out of curiosity, I was trying to get Leopard to run on it with LeopardAssist. I managed to actually get the Leopard DVD to boot, but it KP'ed with a message that it was an unsupported system. I'll be able to get the actual message once I get home from work.

Anyone else have any luck with such an old system?

 

[jruschme]

I've got it running on the single processor version of the same box. If you got the kp, I'd check to see if Leopard assist really worked.

Q: What kind of video card and drives do you have?

 

[gobabushka]

or you can look on LEM for the manual way to do the install. It involves feeding different CPU speed values into the open firmware. It doesn't overclock the processors (im 90% sure about that), just what the firmware reports to the OS. Or you can make a modified version of the install DVD.

 

[protocol7]

Make sure the firmware is updated. I got the same error on my Gigabit Ethernet when I tried Leopard. Updating to the latest firmware got it working.

 

[quinterro]

It's got the bog standard ATI Rage 128 video card in it, a Western Digital 80GB IDE hard disk, and a generic DVD+-RW drive.

As far as I know it has the most recent firmware, but I'll check again when I get home.

 

[jruschme]

The hardware sounds okay. I was afraid you had a SCSI config.

One thing, Leo does not include accelerated drivers for the Rage 128. Check the we for instructions about installing the ones from Tiger.

 

[mcdermd]

Wouldn't a dual 450MHz be a Gigabit Ethernet?

Anyways, the appropriate way to manually set the clock speed that Open Firmware reports is:

Insert the Leopard install DVD then boot your Mac holding down Command+Option+O+F to get into open firmware. Once there, type:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int ” clock-frequency” property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int ” clock-frequency” property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

Hit return after each line shown above. This will make Open Firmware report a dual 867MHz system to OS X.

 

[beachycove]

I just traded a working beige G3 tower and a parts equivalent to someone who needed it for ProTools work, in exchange for an AGP graphics unit.

I happen to have had one of these running before with a dual 500MHz G4 in it; the machine died, but I still have the dual G4. Talk of installing Leopard on such a machine, if it really is this simple, interests me.

How well do these older G4s run Leopard? I have a 64MB NVidia card I could throw in the thing....

 

[jruschme]

With a QE capable video card and plenty of memory, they actually run Leo pretty well. Heck, I've run it on a 400mhz Sawtooth with 1.25gb RAM and a Radeon 7000 AGP and couldn't complain about the performance over Tiger.

FWIW, I think most of the slowdown is in the Dock/Finder with the former being much more graphics intensive.

With a dual 500mhz and nVidia card, it should be very nice.

JR

 

[theos911]

Dual CPUs make a world of difference at the lower clock speeds.

 

[quinterro]

Initially it was a single 400mhz processor. Later I replaced it with a dual G4/450 from a gigabit.

 

[mcdermd]

I had a Cube with a dual-500MHz processor card from a GigE model, 1.5GB RAM and a 256MB GeForce 6400. It ran Leopard decently. Entirely useable but like any G4, it has issues with modern YouTube video.

 

[jruschme]

Some of us can't run a dualie in our Sawtooth. :-(

 

[quinterro]

The message is:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0036C4F8): "Unable to find driver for this platform: \"PowerMac3,1\".\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.0.2/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1378

Edit:

I also typed in the commands listed above with the same result.

 

[jruschme]

That sounds like you need to do a firmware update. I think the update changes the platform to "PowerMac3,3".

 

[quinterro]

I thought I did that years ago. I'll try the firmware update when I get home from work.

 

[quinterro]

Success!

I updated the firmware, then used LeopardAssist. It took a bit longer than expected (almost an hour), but it's running Leopard now.

Currently it's installing updates.

 

[jruschme]

Since you're running the original Rage 128 card, don't forget to pull the kernel modules from a Tiger install.

JR

 

[quinterro]

I think I got all of the needed kexts on there. Doesn't seem any faster though.