I restarted the machine when it finished and immediately tested out X11. Well... the original Sorbet install had X11; after this install, I tried the xquartz that it includes.
There is nothing preventing you to switch to xorg-server-legacy (or switch between these two), and for 10.5 xorg-server-legacy installs the same way as in MacPorts, so you should get identical results. These can be co-installed, just cannot be active simultaneously.
xquartz works fine on 10.6, provided there is no alternative X11 in system paths. There is no claim that it gonna work better on 10.5 than xorg-server-legacy, since that wasn’t tested much.
I have gotten erratic results. Sometimes it starts, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it comes up on display 0:1, sometimes on 0:0. GIMP, as a heavy X11 app, crashed repeatedly, and then suddenly worked.
GIMP is semi-broken on 32-bit, AFAIK, and the issue has nothing to do with X11. You may just not trigger it one time but trigger another.
Further, hunting around, I have found that among the apps that aren't in the 1500 included are things like Abiword, gnumeric, digiKam, Kate, vlc and so on. Clearly, I would like to add some other apps to the 1500 included! Is there a way to do that? I checked, but there is no PPCPorts program, and no apparent way to expand the offering.
I don’t know how it was done, but it is relatively safe to simply move the whole of /opt/local to a new system, it should work fine, as long as a) all ports are deactivated and b) there are no left-over build artifacts. So run `sudo port deactivate active`, delete anything in /opt/local/var/macports/build (and perhaps also distfiles there to save space), and that can be copied to another installation. I have two 10.6.8 now in parallel, and build everything on one of them; when I need testing on the other, I delete /opt/local there and copy from the first one. It works.
BTW, I did try to follow
@barracuda156's instructions for removing the old X11 first, but they did not work at all. They seem to assume the presence of XQuartz, and it was not there to start with.
xorg-server-1.8, xorg-server-legacy and xquartz are drop-in replacements. Nothing assumes specifically my xquartz, nothing links to it, X server is a runtime dependency, so if it does not work well on your system, just use any other alternative. What is important is that system paths are clean from old X11.
It may be
required to start dbus session (without sudo) and set GSK_RENDERER=cairo (depending on the app you use, but can be done generally). Some apps will crash without that (not specific to my ports or powerpc, happens also on x86/arm64).
What was there in the stock Sorbet install is Apple X11 2.06 or some such - I can't query it from here.
Two questions then:
1/ Is there a way to add programs like abiword, gnumeric, digiKam and VLC to the available set, or do I have to delete this prebuilt archive and install PPCPorts from scratch?
If that was done with `port mpkg` then probably no, it cannot be expanded, since there is no database, and the base will not see those as ports. If everything was copied from a functional installation (see above, and use `sudo cp -pRP` or `ditto`), you should be able to resume from what you already have.
2/ Do I need to do something to delete Sorbet's stock X11, and if so, what is it?
Follow this:
https://www.xquartz.org/FAQs.html (just copy-paste a few commands in terminal).
