Use PowerPC for a week?

[tanuki65]

And it can run my Leopard developer preview!

[tanuki65]

I found Apple discs for:

• iWork '05 Trial
• iLife '08
• OS X Leopard

in my disc bin.

[uniserver]

i would think,  shouldn't be too hard on leopard.     heck i still have a Dual CPU atom box around here some where that is still running OSX86 Leopard.

 

now mac os 8.1 that might be more fun.  

[tanuki65]

8.1 won't run on a TiBook. Maybe someday OS 9 though I do 1080p video editing though. Maybe one of those G5 OS 9 hacks.

[tanuki65]

Plans have changed. I am not going with a TiBook, but an Aluminium PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz. I am getting an 80GB hard drive for it. (Total: US$60)

Is 1GB RAM sufficient or should I get an extra gig?

 

Edit: 1GB from OWC would cost US$14.

Edited May 28, 2015 by tanuki65

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Do 2 if you plan to run Leopard.

[tanuki65]

OK!

Edit: Total: US$75-ish. Can probably be offset by selling some stuff (like my iBook G3).

Also, does Apple's USB SuperDrive/MacBook Air SuperDrive work with OS X Leopard on a G4?

 

Edit 2: Should I take the challenge for 3 weeks or a month?

Edited May 28, 2015 by tanuki65

[TheWhiteFalcon]

It doesn't. The USB SuperDrive requires a modern Mac without an internal SuperDrive, it takes more power from the USB ports.

 

• MacBook Pro with Retina display
• MacBook Air
• iMac (late 2012) and later
• Mac mini (late 2009) and later
• Mac Pro (late 2013)

[tanuki65]

Would a standard PC mini-USB drive work if I used a mini-USB to 2 USB ports cable?

Edit: Would a powered hub help? I can't find the cable.

Edit 2: The model I'm getting has USB 2.0

Edited May 28, 2015 by tanuki65

[Cory5412]

If you haven't already bought a TiBook, don't. They're very pretty, but they're a pain to take apart and maintain and they're quite physically unreliable. I also never found them to be faster at Mac OS 9 (or really, even at OS X) than the PowerBook G3. The one exception is if I created a really huge scene in a 3d rendering app, but even then, that's the kind of thing that if you can swing it, you should do on some kind of desktop anyway.

 

Also, if you need an optical drive for a PPC Mac, spend the money on a firewire one. It's not easy or convenient to boot from a USB optical drive on a PPC Mac, even if they work for other tasks.

 

In terms of OS X as "retrochallenge:" *yawn*

 

One of the things that has bothered me about Mac OS X on late PowerPC hardware for a really long time (before I became aware of the security concerns (please dont' reply to those insanely old threads)) is that it's not really that different from Mac OS X on Intel-based hardware, and to be honest, I really don't think it's a very big challenge.

 

Yeah, you're dealing with the fact that PPC hardware is slow and insufficient for the absolute dog that is Mac OS X, and that it also happens to be poorly supported by slimmer, more efficient, and better operating systems, such as Linux and BSD.

 

To me, a real "retrochallenge" (and even this isn't very exciting) would be to go all the way back to Mac OS 9 (preferably on a G3 of some sort, but that's a personal preference) or to a really early PowerPC computer, something that won't even run Mac OS 9 very well.

 

The first retrochallenge had a single simple rule: ten years or older. Unfortunately today that means I could put Windows 8.1U1 on a Pentium 4 and just do all the things I do now, on a bigger and louder computer, slightly slower computer.

 

The current retrochallenge stuff (which seems to focus less on Macs, in part because fewer Mac users are interested in it) is focused a lot more on doing creative things with old computers, and it appears that most people believe the "endurance" challenge to be pretty boring.

[tanuki65]

A 15" PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz, 2GB RAM, 40GB HDD) has been ordered! I also ordered an 80GB Western Digital 9.5mm 2.5" IDE hard drive, which I will upgrade it with.

Edited May 31, 2015 by tanuki65

[CC_333]

Is it an A1106 or A1095?

 

c

[tanuki65]

A1106. 

[VMSZealot]

Really not much of a challenge.  I did just this (involuntarily) last month, and it really wasn't too painful.  My Retina MacBook died (the backlight would come on, the fans would spin up, it got hot, but other than that it did nothing) so I took it to Apple for repair.  That took a week.  Given that I've given my Air to my wife, and my BlackBook to my mother, I needed a notebook for work. That left only my old 667MHz TiBook, chipped paint, dents and all.  It started first time - and, after a few hours plugged into the mains, it even retained a charge. 

 

Sure, it was a little slow - but I was able to load my core work tools (Safari, BBEdit, Microsoft Office, Xcode (in a limited fashion) and iTunes for Music).  I had to wait until the Retina was back before doing any Windows compiles - but other than that it was fine.  

 

I'm kind of used to these shenanigans anyway because I use my SE/30 for preference for text editing and even some shell scripting (woo! A/UX!).  I find the little 9" screen very work-friendly.  It's so small that there is absolutely no temptation whatsoever to load distractions into other windows.  Just the one work window, no messing.

[積 読]

For reasons already mentioned by Cory5412, I have difficulty considering machines running older versions of Mac OS X to be "retro" anything, and I don't find the idea of using it to be particularly challenging or interesting, but I have been putting some thought lately into what is and isn't possible (or reasonable) in Mac OS 9 today. If MacSSH had UTF-8 translation, I could probably take that particular "challenge" without too much frustration.

[VMSZealot]

I was challenged to up the ante and use my LCIII for a couple of days. With Mulberry, BBEdit and MS Office I was able to work quite happily - although I did later run into some difficulty when importing my older MS Office work directly into the latest version.

 

I used Gopher instead of www, and when I did www it was in text only using Lynx. Mulberry handled my email, and Fetch shuttled my work onto newer computers when it was time to return to the modern day.

 

Honestly, it still wasn't too much of a challenge. The biggest problem came when I discovered that (ahem) I'd forgotten to uninstall lemmings!

[Garrett]

Totally possible, but slow. When I interned at the local newspaper office where I wrote articles on a Mac mini powered by a G4 processor (it was the original MacMini from 2005.) While it was extremely slow (although many times faster than a similarly aged IBM desktop model running Windows XP) it still got the work done, and I could fairly decently access the internet using the thing without any major problems. It rendered most websites correctly with some minor issues (due to either the low resolution of the CRT monitor it was connected to, or the old OS and processor that could not handle newer web standards.) When my internship was up this Spring, it still purred along nicely.

 

The transfer from PowerPC to Intel processors didn't happen too terribly long ago, only nine to ten years ago. It's not like when they switched from 68k to PowerPC, which would make more of a challenge but still (mostly) do-able with some tasks.

 

Edited June 21, 2015 by Garrett

[raoulduke]

I agree with ianj (and Cory). And when I tried to use a Kanga indefinitely it was just flatly impossible given the need to interface with modern networks (of which I am not the administrator).

Edited June 21, 2015 by raoulduke

[積 読]

I was actually saying that I'm interested in the general idea for Mac OS 9 (but not for OS X). While I would probably not do a formalized "challenge," I am casually experimenting with which tasks can be reasonably accomplished on a Mac OS 9 machine and which can't. People whose primary computing language uses the Roman alphabet can get away with offloading some of the more difficult to a shell server and using MacSSH. For non-Roman locales, using a legacy character encoding works for localized messages, but UTF-8 filenames cannot be easily read. MacSSH is open-source, though, so that could change!

Edited June 23, 2015 by ianj

[Schmoburger]

I was actually saying that I'm interested in the general idea for Mac OS 9 (but not for OS X). While I would probably not do a formalized "challenge," I am casually experimenting with which tasks can be reasonably accomplished on a Mac OS 9 machine and which can't. People whose primary computing language uses the Roman alphabet can get away with offloading some of the more difficult to a shell server and using MacSSH. For non-Roman locales, using a legacy character encoding works for localized messages, but UTF-8 filenames cannot be easily read. MacSSH is open-source, though, so that could change!

 

I don't find it at all a challenge to use OS9 for most tasks... as mentioned earlier in the thread, I use my (admittedly slightly tickled but still  thoroughly obsolescent by 3 hardware generations) 9600 very regularly with 9.2 and a modest G3 upgrade. Realistically under 80% of situations it does anything I would expect of the G5 just somewhat slower... but even in saying that, it isnt a huge arrow to the knee given that the G5 has 6 times the 4-5 times the RAM, bus bandwidth  and raw processing speed (not even accounting for the inherent improvements in actual architecture... Obviously the 9600 would be slow as balls if I were to run 10.2 (which is installed and possible to boot from but I have zero inclination to do so as if I wanted to use a totally abandoned  version of OSX I can boot up my iMac's, Yikes, G3, or Sawtooth), but under a "classic" operating system and running software designed for it, it is capable and pretty damn fast.

 

For what it is worth I could theoretically use it for everything and it wouldnt really be too much of a problem, as there are legacy applications that do thye job well for any productive task i might need to undertake, and Classilla makes for a very capable web-browsing platform. That said, Youtube is a problem and certain modern pages are very resource heavy or just dont play well (TC forums for instance, operate terribly in Classilla). And add to that my entire 2 and a half week long music library is stored on my hard drive, and while this would be theoretically possible on the 9600, the 36Gb cap on SCSI hard disks would make it impractical to store all my music locally, and whilst using a firewire drive  is an option as it has a firewire card, it is messy... vs just tossing a pair of 500Gb HDD's in the G5 and never having storage concerns for another 10 years.

 

As for the G5 itself, I consider it to be a fairly pedestrian feat using it as a daily machine. The only issue (if you can call it an issue) I have encountered is the inability to use Skype as of last year, which isnt a major concern as I havent used it in years as I always hated how slow and buggy it always tended to be in it's early days, and Australian telecommunications infrastructure is crap anyway so connection issues always made the experience suck. I have Skype on my iPhone anyway and I still dont use it. The only other major issue is the inability to back up my iPhone to the G5 since iOS 7 reuires iTunes 11 which is unavailable for PPC... again this is an annoyance, but can be worked around by either buying a $50 Windows machine for the task or going PCless and using iCloud. Aside from these two issues, using my G5 daily is really no different to using my housemates 3 month old laptop, except that the user experience is IMO, nicer on my Mac. Speedwise, there is really no difference, and there is an older version of a commercial app, or an open-source or freeware sollution to almost everything I will use the machine for. I could buy an iTrashcan tomorrow and realistically it wouldn't be expected to do anything my G5 doesnt do sterlingly already.

[hellslinger]

Is the objective of this challenge to use the PPC hardware, or use retro software?

 

My Dual 1 GHz MDD G4 running Lubuntu 14.04 PPC is a competent machine. Current mainline builds of Firefox with HTML5 means it's usable. For non-web tasks, it's surprisingly snappy -- much more than OS 10.3 or .4 ever was.

Edited June 24, 2015 by hellslinger

[tanuki65]

PPC hardware.

[IPalindromeI]

Well jeez, then you'd be just running Ubuntu on crustier hardware. Whoop de doo.

[hellslinger]

Well jeez, then you'd be just running Ubuntu on crustier hardware. Whoop de doo.

 

Crusty hardware -- you know forum you're on, right?

[IPalindromeI]

The one about Macintoshes with 680x0 processors. "Modern" PPC on isn't terribly interesting, especially with OS X >10.2/any cross-platform Unix. Just run an x86 box, less hassle, just as interesting, and far faster.

Edited June 28, 2015 by IPalindromeI