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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
weckart said:
That's where I hauled mine from. Was going to give a quick test then ask the mods there for permission to share here. Not sure they would have acquiesced as they are pretty nervy and don't want to be taken down but since the builds are out in the open that's now a moot point.

First issue, how to mod the OSInstall.mpkg? Have not done this for a while.
Click to expand...

Great - so possible for quick sharing so we can all dive in any chance you can pop on GDrive or DropBox etc etc temporarily?

Plus you mentioned that 10A96 client(?) is there. That would be invaluable to have rather than shoe-horning stuff into the server version.
 
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weckart said:
That's where I hauled mine from. Was going to give a quick test then ask the mods there for permission to share here. Not sure they would have acquiesced as they are pretty nervy and don't want to be taken down but since the builds are out in the open that's now a moot point.
Click to expand...

IANAL but they don't hold the copyright to the builds so can't legally allow or forbid anyone to share [the builds]. There used to be a mirror that went down but IIRC it lacked all the Apple stuff.
 
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jimjamyaha said:
Plus you mentioned that 10A96 client(?) is there. That would be invaluable to have rather than shoe-horning stuff into the server version.
Click to expand...

It may also be possible (I've wondered, but never tried it so far) to modify an OS X Server disc so that it installs the client version instead by preventing all the server stuff including the setup wizard from being installed. After all, Server is a superset of the client.
 
jimjamyaha said:
Great - so possible for quick sharing so we can all dive in any chance you can pop on GDrive or DropBox etc etc temporarily?

Plus you mentioned that 10A96 client(?) is there. That would be invaluable to have rather than shoe-horning stuff into the server version.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's there but you should be able to deselect the server components from the server install to leave you with just the client to save on a download. That would be a matter of tweaking the installer but it's years since I did this for hackintoshes and I've forgotten how.
 
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Larsvonhier said:
If it does not have a BootX already, you could take the one from 10A96 (or in attachement of p#1).
Chances are, that even then the boot mechanism changed in a way that kext preloading at first stage bootloader does not care. But it´s worth a try anyway then!
Click to expand...
How did you override the hardware checks in the OSInstaller? I know that PlatformSupport.plist came in with Lion and I've completely forgotten where it crops up before then.

[edit] Never mind. I found a Mojave supported version of FlatPackageEditor and rolled my own.
 
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Ok here are all the kexts present in 10A96_Server but missing in 10a261_user.

As expected most of these are basically PPC platform expert related and or PPC hardware drivers.

I know the list on the first page in the wiki lists the ones present in 10a96 and looking for which versions are newer or different in in 10.5.8 - but this slicing of the information below shows what kexts have been removed on later SL builds.

This could help us determine if we can forward port anything to the later SL builds and or the GM - of if without the later Finder or other base components being PPC compiled etc that it is totally impossible.

But let's keep plugging away...

Screenshot 2020-04-29 at 13.14.03.png

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Out of interest, using the ASP option it's listing the 10A96 Finder Build as Intel - even though we know it's dual PPC/Intel.
Screenshot 2020-04-29 at 13.26.19.png
 

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OK. 10A190 has just booted up on my G5. I will update the 1st post with my tweaked OSInstall.mpkg.

Picture 1.png

I just used the same kexts and BootX as per the attachments in the first post and amended the OSInstall.mpkg for 10A190 as the client version will not work with the tweaked OSInstall package uploaded for the Server version.
 
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OK. A quick scoot around the system. My flashed 1900XT card works but QE is not enabled and CI is software only. AirPort isn't working and sleep hangs the system: the screen blanks but the fans still run etc.
 
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Hi all,

So these were the files I copied over from Leopard for cups:

/usr/libexec/cups/backend/ipp
/usr/libexec/cups/daemon/cups-deviced
/usr/libexec/cups/filter/pstops
/usr/sbin/cupsaddsmb
/usr/sbin/cupsctl
/usr/sbin/cupsd
/usr/sbin/cupsdisable
/usr/sbin/cupsenable
/usr/sbin/cupsfilter.

And for sysloig

/usr/sbin/syslogd

Some othert findings:

Tried to get Login Screen to look like client with user photos
but for some reason even copying the login app from Leopard
does not change it.

But with this I found out somethings:

The apps with changes from Leopard Rebiirth seem to work perfectly and
keep the appearance changes :D

Best regards,
voidRunner

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Hi alll,

On a side note "HOW rthe HELL do I get a Geforce 6600 inside
a Powerbook??"
I WANT QE/CI ;-)

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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Larsvonhier said:
Just found that @ASentientBot put two builds (10A190, 10A222) onto archive.org yesterday. Thank you - and perhaps welcome to where the fun is now on the PPC side of computing.
I´ve changed the wiki page so that the links to the currently 3 available builds are in the table now. To be continued..
Click to expand...
I'd love to get involved, but I don't have any functional PPC machines. So I'll stick to working on the Catalina-on-2010-MacBook stuff for now. But I'm glad to have helped a little! It's a super cool project you've got going on here :)

(And thanks to Julian for telling me about this in the first place!)
 
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As promised, here's the new work in progress command line tool. This tool can be used to patch the 10.6 10A96 (server) installer and system with one script. To use it, just download the GitHub repo to your PowerPC Mac, run the script, and select your installer or system volume.

As for running it on my 800Mhz iMac G4, I used the basic script Lars posted a few days back (which I did make). But the installer still didn't boot on my iMac. To work around this, I booted the installer on a supported Intel Mac, then made a disk image of the installation, restored the disk image to my iMac's internal disk, and used the basic script again.

I'll add this to the wikipost too but here's a download link for 10.6 10A222. Thank you @ASentientBot for providing me with it.
 
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Just done some more digging onto the architectures for the builds. Confirmation about the Finder architectures:

10A96_Server
finder: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures: [ppc_7400:Mach-O executable ppc_7400] [x86_64]
finder (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc_7400
finder (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
finder (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

10a261_user
finder: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [i386]
finder (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
finder (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

10A380
finder: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [i386]
finder (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
finder (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
 
It looks like 10A190 is the last installable release but there are bits in 10A222 that are still PPC, so it might be a matter of digging out as much from the later releases as possible and adding those back if they still meet dependencies. However, I suspect that nothing past 10A190 was compiled for PPC and stuff started vanishing from later betas as and when they were updated.
 
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weckart said:
It looks like 10A190 is the last installable release but there are bits in 10A222 that are still PPC, so it might be a matter of digging out as much from the later releases as possible and adding those back if they still meet dependencies. However, I suspect that nothing past 10A190 was compiled for PPC and stuff started vanishing from later betas as and when they were updated.
Click to expand...

As someone who wasn’t really familiar with the 'file' command before, well, today, is there a syntax or way to check multiple system executables/extensions/etc. at once on an OS build which can then be grepped into showing which items are ppc/universal and which are i386/x86_64?
 
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B S Magnet said:
As someone who wasn’t really familiar with the 'file' command before, well, today, is there a syntax or way to check multiple system executables/extensions/etc. at once on an OS build which can then be grepped into showing which items are ppc/universal and which are i386/x86_64?
Click to expand...
That's exactly what I've been thinking.... and new to the File command today too :) Used File for the Finder stuff posted above. But, was trying to find a way by which we could grab this for the whole installation files (or maybe easier to install on intel and then do it from there). No luck so far - but great minds!
[automerge]1588192156[/automerge]
 
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So have done some research/thoughts about searching for PPC files.

For Apps
1) We need to list all the files. We can list all files with ls -RF > ~/Desktop/folder_list.txt
2) Then we need to grep for any exec within App bundles in the usual xyz.app/Contents/MacOS/xyz
3) Then we need to input the execs in a loop to the lipo command such as lipo xyz.app/Contents/MacOS/zxy -info
4) This will output the architecture (xyz.app/Contents/MacOS/xyz is architecture: x86_64)
5) Then we need to save this and repeat.

My knowledge of terminal commands like this is limited - but open to learning and cobbling together.

I'm sure there is a different way we could handle the parsing of kexts and libraries maybe using a different command to lipo to find out the arch of stuff - maybe just 'file'?

Any thoughts appreciated.
 
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Tried the 10A96 client on my G5 and it has all the same problems as the 10A190, so probably very little updating of the extensions, if any, between the versions. Also, the blue screen and cursor issue after installation happens just as with the Server installation.

Oddly enough, the WiFi worked on my A1013 PowerBook G4 but not on the newer unit in my G5 (native Airport on a PCIe card). Time for the laborious process of patching kexts and trying Leopard ones in Snow Leopard.
 
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