Leopard on 700MHz - Advice?

[LightBulbFun]

Not gonna lie man, systems with half the "required" specs on both CPU and RAM plus no graphics support probably don't run "fine." Sure it'll boot up, but you can't really tell me there is much you can do with Leopard on a 450MHz G4 and 256MB of RAM. Thats barely enough to load the Finder.

all Leo really needs is some Semi Decent GPU and it runs fine on any System. I have run it on everything down to a 400Mhz G3 Beige from 1998 and it ran Ok Not the fastest thing in the world but it was fast anough not to cause frustration. (you aint seen leopard on slow Hardware till you booted it up with 96MB of Ram and No Space on the HDD for Swap...) just the other day I was playing with Leo on my G3 BW at 2048x1152 System requirements dont mean anything to us over here

 

[AmazingHenry]

@LightBulbFun, if you're saying that Leopard runs OK on 500MHz G4 and 256MB of RAM, I'll totally be trying this! It should run OK for what I'm doing. It's not like I'll be doing heavy web browsing or YouTube or anything like that. I'll try to get it installed today but I have a lot going on, so I might have to do it tomorrow. Now, instead of speed, has anyone experienced hardware problems? Maybe Leopard is incompatible with some hardware on older Macs? Thanks.

 

[LightBulbFun]

if your running 10.5.8 everything on the iMac will work. yeah should run Ok on your hardware the fact your GPU supports QE helps a lot. (any UniNorth Mac with a G4 can generally run leo without too many problems anything older then uninorth aka Gossamer Like the G3 BW/Yikes and older needs some major system hacking tho)

 

[Halibabamindingu]

Well, here's something about this I forgot to mention earlier. My iMac only has 512MB of RAM. It used to be maxed to 1 GB but I had to remove the internal RAM in order to get it to boot, so now I'm stuck with only a 512MB card. Would this make a big impact on performance?

ram always make an impact in performance, but i guess leopard minimum requirement is 512 mb of ram. Disable all the fancy effects in terminal, and use leopard webkit instead of tenfourfox.

 

[bunnspecial]

As @LightBulbFun said, 700mhz and 512mb really is nothing compared to what some of us have done

One of the other fun ones is running Tiger on a 200mhz 604 with a few hundred mb of RAM. It's even slow on my 9600 with 1.5gb.

Oh, and along those same lines I was troubleshooting my 867mhz TiBook after I got it, but wasn't getting anywhere because the HDD cable was bad. Just to get it to boot, I pulled the hard drive out of my G5, hooked it up to a USB bridge, and booted the TiBook over USB. Although the system was more than capable of running Leopard(867mhz, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9000) booting a full OS install over USB 1.1 puts quite the bottleneck on it. I think it took about 15 minutes to get to a useable desktop.

 

[1042686]

Ok, so after reading this thread, I've decided Im going to install leopard on my QSG4. The plan is this: Partition my boot drive in half to two, 37.5GB. Clone 10.4.11 to the 2nd partition using something like CCC and then install 10.5.4 PPC -> 10.5.8 PPC update files from macintosh garden over the second partition. That way I have both and then I can put OS9.2 onto a 2nd IDE when I come across one. Also I'll get a perfect 10.4.11 and 10.5.8 PMG4 Quicksilver image I can copy onto attached storage in case I screw something up down the line. Let's see if I do it right.

 

[AmazingHenry]

OK, I should have the rest of the day free. Time to install Leopard! Then I'll disable things like Dashboard and Spotlight and then do some Terminal commands I usually do and it should run fine. As @Halibabamindingu said, the actual minimum requirement for Leopard is 512MB, so I don't think it's going to be too bad. For what I'm doing, it should work great, actually.

 

[macmee]

I just put 2gb of ram in my 1ghz g4 imac but it only has 32mb of vram.

Am I screwed for leopard?

 

[128keaton]

I just put 2gb of ram in my 1ghz g4 imac but it only has 32mb of vram.

Am I screwed for leopard?

Nah, 32MB of VRAM is plenty for Leopard.

 

[bunnspecial]

Nah, 32MB of VRAM is plenty for Leopard.

Agreed-especially for an iMac G4.

One of the things more VRAM gets you is the ability to push more pixels while maintaining performance. An iMac GPU doesn't exactly push a huge number of pixels, so I wouldn't get caught up on it.

It's 12:30 and I should be asleep so I'm not going to look it up, but offhand the max you'll find in at least the common PPC cards is 256mb. My Quicksilver has a G5 9600XT driving a Cinema HD display(1920x1200) and a Dell Ultrasharp of some sort or another scavenged from the trash-I think it's 1280x1024. I think the card is 128mb, although I have used a Radeon 9600 Pro PC&Mac with 256mb of VRAM in this computer and for quite a while used a Geforce 4MX with 64mb of VRAM. The 9600XT perked things up a lot by virtue of having Core Image support, but the 4MX did fine and it was pushing a LOT more pixels than your iMac. I've run a bunch of different monitor combinations on that computer(although I've been "stable" in terms of GPU and monitors for several years) but think at one time I was running the Cinema HD and a secondary 1680x1050 display on the 4MX.

My most used Cube has an 800mhz Sonnet and a Geforce 3. I mostly run OS 9 on this computer, but it runs Leopard quite well. The Geforce 3 lacks CI support, but I think has 64mb of VRAM. Before I found this card(I looked for probably a year, and then @LightBulbFun turned up two of them within two weeks of each other, and relayed one to me from the UK after he played with it a bit) I used a Radeon 7500 with 32mb of VRAM. I think at the time I was mostly using an ADC 17" Studio Display, and again Leopard was fine. I'm now using the 17" ADC CRT and the Geforce 3 handles 1600x1200 fine(although I don't run it at that resolution as the display is limited to 65hz and I find that very tiring). I can play Return to Castle Wolfenstein with the settings cranked to max, and from my experimenting with the card in other systems it is CPU bound more than GPU bound. I really should put my other Geforce 3 in my 1.8ghz Cube and swap it for the 800mhz one. Alternatively, I should just switch to a 1.25ghz MDD with a 4Ti, but then I prefer the Cube where it is now.

 

[1042686]

I just installed leopard on my QS PMG4 and updated to 10.5.8 - currently doing it's first (very slow) TM backup to an external. Everything is running pretty well. I did notice a *bit* more of a sluggish performance on certain apps and slower boot up - more like my PMG5. I completely realize this is an old box and as-is was on the edge of specs for the OS so expectations are tempered. Anyhow, I cloned the tiger install to an external and am waiting on a sata to ide adapter I purchased for a couple bucks. This will allow for a 2d HDD under the optical drive which will house this box's original tiger image.

Or the other way-round maybe. I do like booting into Tiger. It was the OSX version that really sold me on apple. Needless to say I like having it around and tweaked.

Ugh this TM back up is taking *For Ever* lol.

 

[bunnspecial]

Are you doing time machine over USB? If so, just remember that you're at 1.1 speeds. My main Quicksilver that I use has had a USB 2.0 card in it pretty much from the day I bought it.

And Firewire is always better if you have a drive.

 

[1042686]

It is to a USB2 card I had installed from my junk box. It's just a big arse backup 32GB lol. I wish I had some FW gear but everything I have is USB1/2/3/4. FW400 would be perfect for this era machine and my PMG5. I do keep my eyes peeled for cheap used FW400 stuff but I haven't seen anything lately aside from cables.

I did find an ancient lacie FW400 external drive from like 1995 for $10.00 LOL but it was humongous like Webster dictionary sized-humongous and I just don't have the space for some power hog monstrosity like that with space for just one 3.5 drive.

I probably should have still picked it up as I bet one of you guys might've dug it. Always good for goofy trade fodder I guess

 

[AmazingHenry]

OK, I have Leopard installed, however I'm having a weird display error when I put the computer to sleep. I need to install the 10.5.8 combo and if the problem is still there I'll go into more detail. I should've updated earlier, but I've been busy.

 

[AmazingHenry]

Well, I had to install the 10.5.8 combo off a flash drive because of a software update error, but I do have 10.5.8 installed now. I'm currently installing the other updates. I'm impressed with performance. For an unsupported Mac, it's not bad at all. LWK takes awhile to open but after that it is very fast! apple.com loaded in about 5 seconds and the transitions on the homepage were smooth. I haven't tested this iMac a lot yet, but it's looking like it will work pretty well! I will probably start using this Mac a lot more, I have some plans for it. Thanks for your advice and experiences and stuff. I found it all very useful.