Wow! Not my cup of tea, but... that's the joy of digging into betas.
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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs
- Thread starter Larsvonhier
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It’s a whole lotta, “Hey, let’s try this!”, followed by “Hey, let’s not try this!”
(InstantOff.prePane, I’m looking right at you!)
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Funny thing about testing all this stuff after all these months:
I’ve never tried to see if or how Dashboard or its Widgets work in 10A96. It’s because I’m one of those dorks who does not like Dashboard or Widgets.
Until, well, now.
Anyway, aside from all the Widgets which require data from online sources that are no longer active (such as Weather, Movies, Stonks, Flights, and Translation), stuff seems to work, yay I guess (if Widgets and Dashboard are the bee’s knees for you). And even the movement when opening Dashboard is pretty fluid, which was somewhat of a surprise for me, I guess.
Y… yay, I guess idk.
I’ve never tried to see if or how Dashboard or its Widgets work in 10A96. It’s because I’m one of those dorks who does not like Dashboard or Widgets.
Until, well, now.
Anyway, aside from all the Widgets which require data from online sources that are no longer active (such as Weather, Movies, Stonks, Flights, and Translation), stuff seems to work, yay I guess (if Widgets and Dashboard are the bee’s knees for you). And even the movement when opening Dashboard is pretty fluid, which was somewhat of a surprise for me, I guess.
Y… yay, I guess idk.
Never used them much, but I will try on 10a109.
I wanted to be sure they were more or less functional, and it was a feature I should have tested, like, over a year ago. I haven’t bothered with swapping in widget versions from 10.5.8 or even 10.5.6 (which came out around the same time as 10A190) the way I’ve done with swapping core components like kexts and frameworks.
I’m not sure I’ll be the one to do the nitty-gritty on Dashboard-related stuff, but anyone else is more than welcome to dive in and explore!
I still remember how Shiira widget completely killed my account after either installation or update. Had to log in as root to remove it manually.
At least some of these widgets are interchangeable between 10A190 and 10.5.8, but I didn’t spend much time on dashboard when last testing so can’t recall which ones unfortunately. Other than dashboard being integrated into the dock I don’t think a great deal differs regarding dashcode apps between 10.5 and 10.6.
Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) and OpenCL APIs were a focus for seed 10A261 onward. Previous builds may contain some elements but not full APIs.
Any news thus far?
P. S. It’s actually a bit strange that some builds are out of reach for ages. Quite a number of people should have had them back then, where are all of them?
Long since deleted in most cases i’d imagine. I did contact a few YouTubers that had videos on various builds a while back and none of them had retained copies.
As far as I understand it, there were builds available for developers via ADC; some of these were actually update bundles to a slightly earlier full kernel (particularly later during development, as the sales release neared).
Then there are nightly builds (which might or might not be formal “builds” as we know them, such as installer.pkg/.mpkg files) which would have been entirely internal to Apple. The nightly changes would have been incremental, as expected with daily versioning. I’m not completely sure if nightly builds involved completely different kernel compiles (i.e., as seen in the xnu version when you run a “uname -a” command).
As for the conjectured late development versions (i.e., the two versions reportedly assembled exactly two and four days before the final “Golden Master” was released to developers and to the DVD duplicators) being built for both architectures, these would need to have Univeral Binary installers as well as UB components within, through and through.
What’s peculiar here is every single build made available to developers, after either of Builds 10A96 or 10A190, indicates a very different development path. If late-development Universal Binary versions did linger internally as late as August 2009 (for whatever reason), then this would be a very different development fork from the Intel-only developer builds being released (as either full installs or as Software Update updaters) at the same time.
That said, if this production stream did actually exist internally and there is a UB build leading all the way up to nearly when Snow Leopard went on sale, then I gather the installation steps would be a lot more piecemeal and broken up than, say, the typical “Install Mac OS X.app” pointing to an Installer.mpkg at the root level of the disk image.
I would love to be surprised, of course, but until something materially verified actually shows up, then I’m doubtful there was a production stream prioritizing a UB Snow Leopard all the way to August 2009 separate from the Intel Snow Leopard which went on sale at the end of August that year.
For most of the life of this project, an invitation in the WikiPost has been extended to current and/or former Apple folks to (quietly) make any interim surviving builds available to our community.
The inherent problem with collecting betas is that once the final release, or perhaps simply a newer beta, is out, most testers — somewhat understandably — lose interest in preserving the now “useless” older betas. With that being said, several (Windows) betas that had been unleaked for years or even decades have eventually turned up more than once, so there’s still hope.
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It’s kinda hard to believe no one saw any utility in preserving a version of OS that works on PPC that never went into release.
If anyone could help me with Airport Extreme, please. I cannot figure out how to make it work.
I have a post about the issue: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/airport-extreme-set-up-problem.2318427/
I wonder what’s more likely…
- It existed but has been “lost?”
- It has never existed?
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Just to make sure, have you followed the steps in post #513? As I recall, they sourced the listed files from Build 10A96.
Insofar as a Build 10A428 and Build 10A430 go, I’m leaning more toward #2, as it doesn’t make a reasonable amount of sense for there to have been full development on a UB so far along after the public announcement to ditch UB support.
I have it connected over Ethernet, so the particular issue is irrelevant. I cannot make Extreme work on 10.5.8 either, while Express works in both with no issues.
I’m afraid you’ve lost me here. AirPort Extreme is the wifi card built into most laptops and many desktops, while AirPort Express is the wifi router which was sold by Apple in many iterations.
I have an external AirPort Extreme. It particular MD031J/A A1408 (5th Generation).
Getting internal card is difficult and likely expensive.
At least there could have existed some builds after 10A109 that were still bootable, I guess. Any marginal improvement on what we have will be valuable.
Sorry. I was referring to what’s internally in your Mac. The internal cards (A1026) for all but the very last PowerBook/iBook/iMac/Mac mini/Power Mac models are relatively easy to come by and are also fairly inexpensive. They cover models between 2003 and 2005:
The AirPort Extreme/Bluetooth combo modules used in the final edition PowerPC Macs (A1126) are a bit more specialized and a bit more difficult to come by, since they were a standard part and not an add-on accessory:
The trick with these is the plug-in receptacle on the left side of these smaller cards may either be “innies” (as shown) or “outies” (not unlike a bellybutton) and vary depending on the intended model they were destined: the iBook G4 mid-2005 used the “outie” and the late 2005 PowerBook G4 used the “innie”.
In any event, when talking about PowerPC gear, “AirPort Extreme” tends to reference these cards and not the later AirPort Extreme routers. And if you’re looking for the former, I have a couple I no longer need and would be fine with just giving one to you — if you want to cover postage from Canada.
Unless they retained one or two PowerPC engineers to work on a Universal Binary build as some kind of remedial or contingency plan B (such as the PR from ditching PowerPC Macs got to be nasty and dinged their stock value), then I doubt they had much of anything going on with a Universal Binary Build after Build 10A190.
That said, I don’t think that should be a point of discouragement! There’s still a lot to be done with the two builds we already know work with PowerPC gear.
If you got the one compatible with the Quad, absolutely, I will highly appreciate that (and of course cover postage).