There is a way to pull from the local source folder and i believe the plist can be edited but i’m not home to verify this currently.
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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs
- Thread starter Larsvonhier
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offtop mode on / I recall we had a discussion about a case when a port is showing as failing on Macports port health status. I forgot where, but anyway. I wanted to create an illustration of my point that port health does not translate into "port cannot build" and found a port that was failing on literally every system and had 0 successful installations - gnotime.
Well, here we go:
I had to fix guile, gnuregex and libgnome dependencies for 10.6 PPC and file a ticket for qof dependency, which yesterday got fixed. (So now you will see that gnotime has few successful builds - that's because qof now builds.)
Hasn't been as neat as I expected, since qof turned out to have an annoying bug, but anyway, I guess point is proven.
/ offtop mode off
P. S. For other who haven't seen, Macports development thread is here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-6-powerpc-10a190-and-10-6-8-rosetta.2332711/
I got it with 10A96 now too. Your image worked by the way, thanks so much!
On 10A96:
WiFi is recognized, however I cannot check right now if it connects, because iOS 15 broke hotspot and it is impossible to connect on 10.6.x now: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-to-share-wifi-from-ios-15.2338049/
Blutooth is broken – cannot even be turned on.
WiFi is recognized, however I cannot check right now if it connects, because iOS 15 broke hotspot and it is impossible to connect on 10.6.x now: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-to-share-wifi-from-ios-15.2338049/
Blutooth is broken – cannot even be turned on.
Now you have 10A096 running, you can follow the fixes @B S Magnet has detailed in the Wiki to optimise the system.
Quick update on what I’m currently doing:
I have uploaded a fresh pre-installed 10A096 Restore Image for new users, this image can be restored to a partition or hdd/ssd for a clean install with only the initial patches applied to allow booting on PowerPC. This should enable anybody wishing to test @B S Magnet ’s tables of findings and fixes with relative ease and hopefully encourage further testing and experimentation.
I decided last night to attempt to install a fresh copy of 10A190 to my ‘unsupported’ 2008 Aluminium MacBook, out of curiosity and with a view to putting the machine to work on the project that I originally purchased it for.
I have managed to install 10A190 successfully but still need to replace a few kexts and bundles etc to get internal keyboard, trackpad, wifi and bluetooth working. 10A190 on this machine is fast; the Finder is snappy and functional, disk mounting and unmounting work properly as do Dashboard and all system preference panes etc, screensavers do not work still however the ‘blocky image’ issue is not present. It seems that a number of bugs we previously identified are only present for PowerPC and not intel on the same build.
Once i’ve replaced the components needed to unplug my external keyboard and mouse, i will begin to align this system with my PowerBook G4 development build system and endeavour to build for both moving forward to maximise cross-compilation compatibility.
One final thing that i noticed immediately as present on intel but not PowerPC is the welcome video when first running the OS - on PowerPC systems only the audio is presented.
Edit:
I now have keyboard and trackpad with multitouch support as well as wifi working on the 2008 Aluminium MacBook.
I have uploaded a fresh pre-installed 10A096 Restore Image for new users, this image can be restored to a partition or hdd/ssd for a clean install with only the initial patches applied to allow booting on PowerPC. This should enable anybody wishing to test @B S Magnet ’s tables of findings and fixes with relative ease and hopefully encourage further testing and experimentation.
I decided last night to attempt to install a fresh copy of 10A190 to my ‘unsupported’ 2008 Aluminium MacBook, out of curiosity and with a view to putting the machine to work on the project that I originally purchased it for.
I have managed to install 10A190 successfully but still need to replace a few kexts and bundles etc to get internal keyboard, trackpad, wifi and bluetooth working. 10A190 on this machine is fast; the Finder is snappy and functional, disk mounting and unmounting work properly as do Dashboard and all system preference panes etc, screensavers do not work still however the ‘blocky image’ issue is not present. It seems that a number of bugs we previously identified are only present for PowerPC and not intel on the same build.
Once i’ve replaced the components needed to unplug my external keyboard and mouse, i will begin to align this system with my PowerBook G4 development build system and endeavour to build for both moving forward to maximise cross-compilation compatibility.
One final thing that i noticed immediately as present on intel but not PowerPC is the welcome video when first running the OS - on PowerPC systems only the audio is presented.
Edit:
I now have keyboard and trackpad with multitouch support as well as wifi working on the 2008 Aluminium MacBook.
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Awesome. Which Xcode do you plan to use on it, native, 3.2 Release or 3.2.6?
I will start with the same modified 10A190 tools i’ve been using on the PowerBook and go from there to try and keep as many factors identical as possible across the different systems.
By the way could you please specify what exactly you modified, if you recall that?
I don’t remember off the top of my head other than gnumake, bsdmake, targetconfig, xcrun, autoconf and automake being replaced early on. Since then i have transplanted PowerPC compatible files from 10A222 as well so i’ll need to check when i set-up on the MacBook and get back to you.
Hello,
I am extremely new to all of this but admire everyone's hard work and determination and would be interested to see if I can help out in any way in this effort, if not just stay out of everyone else's way. I have not read all of the comments because there is such a massive number, but are there any very important things I should know other than the things in the original Wikipost? Also, I was curious if the 10A190 build has been tested on an iMac G5 20" ALS yet? (I did not see this model listed on the table)
Thanks very much!
I am extremely new to all of this but admire everyone's hard work and determination and would be interested to see if I can help out in any way in this effort, if not just stay out of everyone else's way. I have not read all of the comments because there is such a massive number, but are there any very important things I should know other than the things in the original Wikipost? Also, I was curious if the 10A190 build has been tested on an iMac G5 20" ALS yet? (I did not see this model listed on the table)
Thanks very much!
I’d say just throw yourself into setting up a spare Mac by installing one of the builds of your choosing, then refer back to the wikipost’s steps on improving stability and such, and explore away!
When something unexpected does come up, search on this thread, as it’s a fair bet it might have been experienced by someone else.
If you really find yourself getting into using SL-PPC on a semi-regular basis, you might want to get into testing things. Any testing would be valuable data for the project, given how relatively few hardware combinations have been applied so far with accumulated testing (like what’s been aggregated in Tables 2–4 of the WikiPost). If you don’t see your model on there, then that’s a good sign that no one has tried setting up SL-PPC on that line just yet.
One area I know which could use some love is getting someone to begin testing the swapping out and bringing in of components from 10.5.8 into Build 10A190 (see Table 4). I’ve spent a good while with Build 10A96 working on doing that there, and others on here have been working on other areas of Build 10A190. To date, however, there still remain a lot of “TBDs” in the Build 10A190 column.
My hope is once someone goes through the same with Build 10A190, there will be a way for us to put together some kind of combo patch installer for Build 10A190 to make its everyday usability and stability improve for anyone who wants to use it. (This is precisely what I’m working on at the moment with Build 10A96.) In fact, the goal of doing something like that will, in the long run, benefit more users, as there is a generally higher interest in Build 10A190 due to its later stage in development.
If you’re up for some fun and problem solving, welcome aboard!
@B S Magnet thanks for the welcome and information!
I tried 10A190 on the iMac G5 and it works as well as I should expect this SL beta to run. Of course, no Wi-Fi or BT, among other issues. Would you mind if I add this to the table (2)? I’ll start working on the steps to improve stability later hopefully.
I tried 10A190 on the iMac G5 and it works as well as I should expect this SL beta to run. Of course, no Wi-Fi or BT, among other issues. Would you mind if I add this to the table (2)? I’ll start working on the steps to improve stability later hopefully.
Awesome that you join us!
For Wi-Fi and BT, few members here were able to fix Wi-Fi by pulling components from 10A96 (where Wi-Fi works while BT does not). It has not worked for me so far, though I did not yet exhaust all combinations (to be done).
BT might be fixed with components from 10.5.8, but no one has done it yet, apparently.
Please let us know if you succeed in either.
@barracuda156 you should retry the wifi fix again making sure that you have corrected permissions and ownership on the replaced frameworks and kexts. I have verified that the fix works on my iBook G4, PowerBook G4 and now also my MacBook Unibody 2008.
With regard to Bluetooth, I haven’t tried it personally as I don’t use it, but @vddrnnr detailed a fix earlier in the thread replacing files with the versions from 10.5.8 that worked for him.
I'm very impressed with this effort but confused at the net gain in Snow Leopard for PPC machines? What do we get in Snow Leopard that we couldn't get in Leopard?
Thanks. I went ahead and overhauled Table 2 to set it up to be more human-readable — namely, to arrange machines to be ordered from oldest to newest. I did this, factoring in your model along the way and also updating the “last updated” info at the top.
Interestingly, I have moved the BT-related components from 10.5.8 into my 10A96 build (and plan to include them in that patch I’m working on), but because my hardware won’t boot with AP/BT connected to the hinky logic board, I have no way of testing it beyond verifying with System Profiler that the 10.5.8 BT-related kexts/frameworks associated with are loading correctly (which they are).
One of the things I’ve been doing with the WikiPost, to keep its size below our (final) hard character cap, is a somewhat-cumbersome, but effective process of making the edits in the rich editor, then selecting it to show BB code, then copying/pasting that into BBedit, where I then remove the random spaces and carriage returns the MR/Xenforo editor shoves in in rich mode, then I copy that BB code back over to the MR editing window (which is also how I come up with the character counts with each editing note). It’s kind of an inconvenience, but well worth it to have room for additional data to be added in the future.
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Snow Leopard was Apple’s project of heavily refining OS X under the bonnet and cutting down on kernel-level kludges which arose when Apple began to support both PowerPC and Intel architectures from Tiger 10.4.3 forward. Initially, Apple team developers began work on Darwin kernel 10.0.0 (Snow Leopard) with Universal support for both PowerPC and Intel architecture. Mid-stream in that development en route to the retail release, Apple announced officially they would drop support for PowerPC architecture.
(Separately, a small team at Apple, from several available sources at the time, may have maintained a Universal binary fork for development internally as a fallback contingency, with internal nightly builds beyond what was made available to Apple Developer Connection members).
Those of us who’ve been working with the Snow Leopard builds which run on PowerPC architecture have observed some of these refinements even in the alpha builds to which we have access.
As to why I choose to work on this project? Snow Leopard was, far and away, the most stable major version of OS X/macOS I’ve ever worked with (and others have said similarly, sometimes noting how OS X Mavericks came pretty close). It was the last major version of OS X before a move to monetize services within the OS, to side-port iOS UI-related functions back into OS X, to move services toward a cloud-based model (with related phoning-home routines hard-baked into the OS), and the last major version before the cumbersome partition system which came to the fore with OS X Lion and Apple’s abandonment of distributing the OS with optical media.
As to why I don’t just use 10.5.8 Leopard and be done with it?
Two of my PowerPC Macs actually do run 10.5.8 because that’s how I set them up to run before this community project started. Out of box, 10.5.8 consumes significantly more drive space (some of which can be alleviated via user-discovered routines like removing the significant disk waste of the Designable.nib files).
Separately, the UI for Finder in 10.5.8 is both “looser” and of lower contrast than even the version being worked on with the earliest ADP build of Snow Leopard, Build 10A96 (notable, in that 10A96 still featured a Carbon code base, which wouldn’t get replaced with a Cocoa code base until a bit later in Snow Leopard’s development).
Finally, after using Build 10A96 with one PowerBook alongside 10.5.8 on another complementary PowerBook of the same specs, I can’t say 10.5.8 is any more stable than what’s found with Build 10A96 — which is sort of a testament of that refinement which underwrote Apple’s purpose of developing Snow Leopard in the first place. Some of those refinements for the retail release of Snow Leopard actually do appear quietly in Leopard, post-10.5.6, and this project has back-ported several of those refinements into Builds 10A96 and 10A190 and yielding positive results.
I hope this helps to answer your question.
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I'm going to join the research and development team by installing Snow Leopard on the following machines in the afternoon:
- Dual 1.25GHz PowerMac G4 MDD (FW800)
- Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 (Early 2005)
- 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 15" (5,4 from Late 2004)
- 1.9GHz iSight iMac G5
I'll try installing build 10A96 and then 10A190, if they boot and work reasonaby well!
- Dual 1.25GHz PowerMac G4 MDD (FW800)
- Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 (Early 2005)
- 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 15" (5,4 from Late 2004)
- 1.9GHz iSight iMac G5
I'll try installing build 10A96 and then 10A190, if they boot and work reasonaby well!
I’ll be especially interested to see how things go for you on your iSight iMac G5!
I’ll let you know, it’s the first machine I’m going to try
A lot of us have been wondering about the final iMac G5s with iSight, as these do feature a redesigned logic board and PCIe buses. Given what we known to date regarding video support, only PCIe (and rare PCI) systems have shown full hardware support with the SL-PPC test environment.
Our hope is that we can determine whether these iMacs are able to provide hardware-level support of Core Image and Quartz Extreme with the Radeon X600 Pro and XT variants bundled with the 1.9 and 2.1GHz variants. Said hardware support may work without needinging bring in 10.5.8 components/kexts/frameworks, or it may require copying those over 10.5.8 ATI-related kexts.
I hope it wil, providing that this Mac will survive the day... you know about the memory controller (thermal paste is fresh and new)
Nice. You should be good so long as the capacitors remain good.
Also, were you aware that your series iMac G5 can be upgraded to 4.5GB RAM?