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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

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Booted Mac Mini 1.5GHz (64MB Radeon 9200) with A190 image restored onto a LaCie external drive after the Lexar FireWire CF reader refused bootin' and just kept on lootin'.
As with others, background image is heavily pixelated, Airport does not work. Tried Safari but it cored. TenFourFox worked fine over wired ethernet. No gcc installed, so could not compile stuff. What are others using to compile, Xcode for Leopard?
 

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Molon Labe said:
Booted Mac Mini 1.5GHz (64MB Radeon 9200) with A190 image restored onto a LaCie external drive after the Lexar FireWire CF reader refused bootin' and just kept on lootin'.
As with others, background image is heavily pixelated, Airport does not work. Tried Safari but it cored. TenFourFox worked fine over wired ethernet. No gcc installed, so could not compile stuff. What are others using to compile, Xcode for Leopard?
Click to expand...

You can install the Xcode from the 10A096 server image for GCC 4.2 and the 10.6 SDK.

There are workarounds for some of the issues you’re experiencing - read through the previous posts in the thread to get up to speed as we don’t have a FAQ at the moment.
 
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i tried reinstalling to fix my corrupted bootx file but now when i boot the installer it just stays at the apple logo with the spinning wheel and never finishes booting
 
Hi all,

Just came across this

Mac QuartzGL (2D drawing on the graphics card) performance

QuartzGL was introduced as an official feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (although it was a developer-only feature in Mac OS X 10.4 as Quartz 2D Extreme). However, it is off by default and is largely ignored by most developers. In this post, I look at how to enable QuartzGL, the performance...
www.cocoawithlove.com www.cocoawithlove.com

It seems that to use QuartzGL on an application we need to have the Info.plist with
one additional key so the application will user QuartzGL "automagically" but maybe performance
benefits won't be all that much.
We should test and see if it helps those without QE/CI.
I'll let you know if I find apps that benefit from it.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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iQQator said:
// In /var/log/system.log
endless restart cupsd (no ppc, copy from 10.5 fixed)
endless restart ntpd (no ppc, copy from 10.5 fixed)
Click to expand...
Just tried to follow your ntpd swap and discovered that on my A190 build all ntpd binaries are already universal. Which file exactly did you see as intel-only? (The wrapper does not contain any code and only points to the /sbin/ binary...)
 
Larsvonhier said:
Just tried to follow your ntpd swap and discovered that on my A190 build all ntpd binaries are already universal. Which file exactly did you see as intel-only? (The wrapper does not contain any code and only points to the /sbin/ binary...)
Click to expand...

Probably worth recompiling for security purposes at any rate, to patch the vulnerabilities:

NTPD Security Notices
 
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About your questions, @vddrnnr

I re-tried to change frameworks on A190 yesterday (again). This time doing it very carefully and step by step under 10.5.8 so no file copy goes wrong due to strange finder behaviour of A190.

A few good signs now in that area:

- frameworks seem to be changeable without completely losing boot capability! (don´t really know what went wrong initially, sorry for the fuzz)
- the messages that I saw regarding "unloading of kexts" seem to be normal and unrelated to a possible unfit framework mixture due to dependencies (I think when pre-linked kernel cache was created on one of my machines it included extensions that are not needed on other machines, so that stuff unloads during boot)
- the CoreUI smoothness patch does not work on A190 (I think we need to find another combination or frameworks involved, if it´s possible at all there): When all three frameworks are changed to the 10.5.8 parts, loginwindow crashes. I also tried to use the 10.5.8 loginwindow app but it´s also crashing then. In certain combinations of the three FWs I could semi-reach Finder: Windowserver crashes and re-starts login prompt in a loop.
- during my experiments I found that the Windowserver binary inside CoreGraphics framework can be replaced with the (smaller) one from 10.5.8 without any side effects - so far. Please check yourself and see if it works (it might be a bit faster than the 10.6 version), the framework is attached for testing
edit: too big for upload, so I attach the binary itself only - pls. drop to the right place inside CoreGraphics FW
- in kext webcontentfilter there was an intel-only binary which I also replaced with the 10.5.8 one. I´m not sure if it´s loaded and in what context (seems to be a kext that only loads when needed at runtime), attached also below.
- ATS Server (also located in ApplicationServices, v4.0) throws "cannot be loaded" errors during boot, I replaced it first with the 10.5.8 version 3.8: Seems to run then for the first time on my A190. Notices some minor and some severe faults in some fonts, corrects (disables those sever) and does not complain afterwards anymore. Now the clou: Version 4.0 from A96 also runs, does the same corrections and behaves afterwards. ;-)

[automerge]1591001106[/automerge]

Another idea: How about faking AGP cards as being PCI-X or PCI-E within Open Firmware (before booting)?
(Similar to making Leo installs on <867MHz CPUs possible years ago without patching anything).
Could the device tree be altered in a way that we can get OpenGL from AGP cards this way? (Even if its only preliminary until one of the Hackintosh cracks tune in (Netkas et al) and we might get some kind of enabler-kext then.)

OF experts wanted ;-)
 

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Hi @Larsvonhier,

About the Frameworks thats good to hear that they seem to be able to be
changed :D
Regarding the loginwindow I'm also using the one from Leopard but I replaced
the app and the loginwindow bundle also. Maybe that's why it fails to load?

PS. any news from netkas?

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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vddrnnr said:
Hi @Larsvonhier,

About the Frameworks thats good to hear that they seem to be able to be
changed :D
Regarding the loginwindow I'm also using the one from Leopard but I replaced
the app and the loginwindow bundle also. Maybe that's why it fails to load?

PS. any news from netkas?

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...
No news yet from @netkas , I also tried to use his web contact form to get the message to him but it did not go through and seemed to reset the form each time I sent it. Either he has several messages now or nothing at all.
Another idea: I found some Radeon 7500 patcher that uses some kind of wrapper also (like the ATY_init). There is even some "Callista" chip set kext for PPC in it (although the HAL is intel only again). The wrapper tries to load, but cannot register (intel). Perhaps we can find the author "Rogabean" of that one?
 

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Larsvonhier said:
Yes, but the question remains, what file you found was intel-only? Would like to cross-check on that...
Click to expand...

I haven’t changed the binary yet so hopefully @iQQator clarify?
[automerge]1591018879[/automerge]
Larsvonhier said:
About your questions, @vddrnnr

I re-tried to change frameworks on A190 yesterday (again). This time doing it very carefully and step by step under 10.5.8 so no file copy goes wrong due to strange finder behaviour of A190.

A few good signs now in that area:

- frameworks seem to be changeable without completely losing boot capability! (don´t really know what went wrong initially, sorry for the fuzz)
- the messages that I saw regarding "unloading of kexts" seem to be normal and unrelated to a possible unfit framework mixture due to dependencies (I think when pre-linked kernel cache was created on one of my machines it included extensions that are not needed on other machines, so that stuff unloads during boot)
- the CoreUI smoothness patch does not work on A190 (I think we need to find another combination or frameworks involved, if it´s possible at all there): When all three frameworks are changed to the 10.5.8 parts, loginwindow crashes. I also tried to use the 10.5.8 loginwindow app but it´s also crashing then. In certain combinations of the three FWs I could semi-reach Finder: Windowserver crashes and re-starts login prompt in a loop.
- during my experiments I found that the Windowserver binary inside CoreGraphics framework can be replaced with the (smaller) one from 10.5.8 without any side effects - so far. Please check yourself and see if it works (it might be a bit faster than the 10.6 version), the framework is attached for testing
edit: too big for upload, so I attach the binary itself only - pls. drop to the right place inside CoreGraphics FW
- in kext webcontentfilter there was an intel-only binary which I also replaced with the 10.5.8 one. I´m not sure if it´s loaded and in what context (seems to be a kext that only loads when needed at runtime), attached also below.
- ATS Server (also located in ApplicationServices, v4.0) throws "cannot be loaded" errors during boot, I replaced it first with the 10.5.8 version 3.8: Seems to run then for the first time on my A190. Notices some minor and some severe faults in some fonts, corrects (disables those sever) and does not complain afterwards anymore. Now the clou: Version 4.0 from A96 also runs, does the same corrections and behaves afterwards. ;-)

[automerge]1591001106[/automerge]
Click to expand...

I’ve been playing with the same frameworks from retail 10.6. CoreUI replacement fixes graphics but I’m currently experiencing a cyclic Finder crash upon reaching the desktop.

Replacing the 80211 kext from 10A096 gives a ‘kext not installed correctly’ error message. Hopefully once i can reach the desktop again a rebuild of kextcache with the -a ppc flag and -system-prelinked-kernel might fix the extension loading issues.
 
Last edited:
Larsvonhier said:
No news yet from @netkas , I also tried to use his web contact form to get the message to him but it did not go through and seemed to reset the form each time I sent it. Either he has several messages now or nothing at all.
Another idea: I found some Radeon 7500 patcher that uses some kind of wrapper also (like the ATY_init). There is even some "Callista" chip set kext for PPC in it (although the HAL is intel only again). The wrapper tries to load, but cannot register (intel). Perhaps we can find the author "Rogabean" of that one?
Click to expand...

There’s also this OpenGL hack that i came across for 7800GS. Again haven’t looked into it properly but potentially useful:
 

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Amazing work! Now that the cat is out of the bag, Apple could just release those later SL ppc builds that have probably been sitting in their "just in case" drawer for years!

On a different note, does anyone know if the Darwin 10.8 kernel still contains a ppc image?
 
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I installed it today on my PowerMac G5, runs fine so far.

But the Dashboard doesn't work. It keeps generating error messages that it stopped working. Annoying..
 
ChrisCharman said:
I haven’t changed the binary yet so hopefully @iQQator clarify?
[automerge]1591018879[/automerge]


I’ve been playing with the same frameworks from retail 10.6. CoreUI replacement fixes graphics but I’m currently experiencing a cyclic Finder crash upon reaching the desktop.

Replacing the 80211 kext from 10A096 gives a ‘kext not installed correctly’ error message. Hopefully once i can reach the desktop again a rebuild of kextcache with the -a ppc flag and -system-prelinked-kernel might fix the extension loading issues.
Click to expand...
The "kext not installed properly" comes up when you swap kexts "in vivo" on a running system and do not get the chance to fix permissions in time. Just boot to another OS and do it from there.
 
I just wanted to activate SSH, but the System Preferences just give me the Spinning Beach Ball Of Death..

Edit: Activating it via Terminal works.
 
Installed XCode from 10A190, and tried out some of the Developer graphic tools. Quartz Debug had the Quartz Extreme options turned off, but even after enabled, QE still shows as "Not Supported" on System Profiler. Note that QuartzGL is shown as supported if the option is ticked on.
The Radeon 9200 on the Mac Mini G4 seems to be correctly identified as AGP on System Profiler, but Quartz Composer refused to startup (look at the message on the screenshot).
Compiled macports and it is still selfupdating. Want to install cups as I read that it is the reason behind System Preferences crashing so much.
 

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Molon Labe said:
Installed XCode from 10A190, and tried out some of the Developer graphic tools. Quartz Debug had the Quartz Extreme options turned off, but even after enabled, QE still shows as "Not Supported" on System Profiler. Note that QuartzGL is shown as supported if the option is ticked on.
The Radeon 9200 on the Mac Mini G4 seems to be correctly identified as AGP on System Profiler, but Quartz Composer refused to startup (look at the message on the screenshot).
Compiled macports and it is still selfupdating. Want to install cups as I read that it is the reason behind System Preferences crashing so much.
Click to expand...
Good to have another option for QE control besides the x86tool that can (on some setups) enable QGL as well.
The issue with the now unsupported cards is that AGP instead of PCI-... seems to rule them out. Need to find a way to circumvent that (see older posts).
 
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