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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

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Hello,

I copied the file from 10.5.8 (just ntpd, not cupsd) but I don't think I did it correctly, unfortunately. In the log it says "Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight" both for ntpd and cupsd. Maybe cupsd will be fixed when I get to copying those files. I attached the full log, because I might be focusing on the wrong thing.

Separately, I tried IOBluetoothFamily.kext which works just as well as the 10A096 kext, and by that I mean not at all. The Bluetooth hardware isn't recognized. But I am able to open BT File Exchange and BT Setup Assistant. They don't do anything but they don't get stuck either. I then replaced the kext with the one from 10.5.8 and those applications as well as the BT preference pane return to hanging forever. That makes me wonder if whatever changes I make from this point on wouldn't do anything for the BT issue. Ever since attempting to connect a device a week ago, anything BT-related seems to hang whenever the BT hardware is recognized. At least from what I can observe with my extremely limited knowledge.

Thanks
 

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tensixturtle said:
Hello,

I copied the file from 10.5.8 (just ntpd, not cupsd) but I don't think I did it correctly, unfortunately. In the log it says "Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight" both for ntpd and cupsd. Maybe cupsd will be fixed when I get to copying those files. I attached the full log, because I might be focusing on the wrong thing.

Separately, I tried IOBluetoothFamily.kext which works just as well as the 10A096 kext, and by that I mean not at all. The Bluetooth hardware isn't recognized. But I am able to open BT File Exchange and BT Setup Assistant. They don't do anything but they don't get stuck either. I then replaced the kext with the one from 10.5.8 and those applications as well as the BT preference pane return to hanging forever. That makes me wonder if whatever changes I make from this point on wouldn't do anything for the BT issue. Ever since attempting to connect a device a week ago, anything BT-related seems to hang whenever the BT hardware is recognized. At least from what I can observe with my extremely limited knowledge.

Thanks
Click to expand...
Did you correctly set permissions and ownership on the cupsd binary? Your system log is showing a ‘Bad cpu type’ error which should not be the case if you’re using the 10.5.8 executable.

Your log still shows Bluetooth errors related to Appkit - did you try replacing the framework with the Leopard version, or corresponding version to the Bluetooth components you’re attempting to use?
 
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@ChrisCharman at the time of writing I had only gotten around to ntpd. But now I moved cupsd and Appkit, and was rebooting into SL to do permissions when I got a no boot. Once a KP. I did verbose boot and got this:
Unknown-1.jpeg

After that it seems to go in a "Login Window Application Started" loop. I must have really messed up this time :/
Do you have any thoughts possibly? I probably have to do a clean install.

Thanks
 
ChrisCharman said:
Hi @barracuda156

Might be worth editing the above post with the title ‘Results for DP builds via Virtualisation on X86_64 Hardware’ or something similar - for newcomers to the project who may only be following along with the main goal of ‘…on PowerPC Hardware’ so they don’t get confused with testing results.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, done.
By the way did you try building PPC software in 10A190 on Intel? Does it work? I didn’t have time to try it yet.
 
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tensixturtle said:
Separately, I tried IOBluetoothFamily.kext which works just as well as the 10A096 kext, and by that I mean not at all. The Bluetooth hardware isn't recognized.
Click to expand...

For BT, I think you should consistently pull over all BT-related components from 10.5.8 (since on 10A96 it is broken), and make sure to set not only permissions, but ownership appropriately.
 
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tensixturtle said:
@ChrisCharman at the time of writing I had only gotten around to ntpd. But now I moved cupsd and Appkit, and was rebooting into SL to do permissions when I got a no boot. Once a KP. I did verbose boot and got this:
View attachment 1993010
After that it seems to go in a "Login Window Application Started" loop. I must have really messed up this time :/
Do you have any thoughts possibly? I probably have to do a clean install.

Thanks
Click to expand...
Your Bluetooth is recognised so you’re certainly part way there. Have you replaced the Bluetooth preference pane with the Leopard version?

I don’t see anything on your screenshot that explains the hang but based on what you’ve said and assuming you replaced the Appkit Framework correctly, it seems like it’s not compatible without additional work. Replace Appkit with the original version and you should be fine again. Don’t panic if your system fails to boot when messing with system components, it is to be expected i’m afraid. You should check the log files to see what went wrong.
 
Last edited:
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A general rule of thumb I use when testing, which might come in useful for anyone who’s beginning to get their hands dirty with the inner workings of SL-PPC:

For every single file and directory I bring in from another source, such as 10.5.8, or QuickTime 7.7.0, I never overwrite anything in the SL-PPC environment. What I do is I use, as root, a “mv” (“move”) command to rename the SL-PPC file/directory I’m going to replace first before copying in stuff from another source. That way, if I need to revert back to square one, it saves a lot of trouble along the way.

In short, mv-and-cp routine more or less looks like this, as root (here, dealing with the ALF.kext):

# cd /System/Library/Extensions/
# mv ALF.kext ALF.kext.10A96 (note: for mv/rename, I use “10A96” as suffix to help me mark the original file from my 10A96 install)
# cp -R /Volumes/[[Leopard\ Install\ Source]]/System/Library/Extensions/ALF.kext .
# chown -R 0:0 ALF.kext (sets correct ownership defaults)
# chmod -R xxx ALF.text (where “xxx” is set to whatever other contents in the same directory already have — often 755, sometimes 775, less so 644)

That’s basically it. Now I’ll have a ALF.kext.10A96 and an ALF.kext in place, and the system will ignore the 10A96-suffix item(s).

1650290687096.png


In short, I now have hundreds of items on my SL-PPC system with that .10A96 suffix (peppered with a couple of other suffixes from other sources).

Hope this helps.
 
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barracuda156 said:
For BT, I think you should consistently pull over all BT-related components from 10.5.8 (since on 10A96 it is broken), and make sure to set not only permissions, but ownership appropriately.
Click to expand...
Yes, I will try to do that. I had originally done this but Bluetooth was only half-functional. The menu in the menu bar wouldn't work and the preference pane wouldn't open. The iMac was discoverable, however. I think I have been remembering my chown and my chmod commands for every file.

ChrisCharman said:
Your Bluetooth is recognised so you’re certainly part way there. Have you replaced the Bluetooth preference pane with the Leopard version?

I don’t see anything on your screenshot that explains the hang but based on what you’ve said and assuming you replaced the Appkit Framework correctly, it seems like it’s not compatible without additional work. Replace Appkit with the original version and you should be fine again. Don’t panic if your system fails to boot when messing with system components, it is to be expected i’m afraid. You should check the log files to see what went wrong.
Click to expand...
I have not replaced the preference pane with the one from 10.5.8. I had in the past but no way would it work for me. It wouldn't open and System Preferences ended up hanging. Then, I couldn't get the 10A190 one back, the only one that opened. I had to re-install, although there would have been a better way to do it probably.

B S Magnet said:
A general rule of thumb I use when testing, which might come in useful for anyone who’s beginning to get their hands dirty with the inner workings of SL-PPC:

For every single file and directory I bring in from another source, such as 10.5.8, or QuickTime 7.7.0, I never overwrite anything in the SL-PPC environment. What I do is I use, as root, a “mv” (“move”) command to rename the SL-PPC file/directory I’m going to replace first before copying in stuff from another source. That way, if I need to revert back to square one, it saves a lot of trouble along the way.

In short, mv-and-cp routine more or less looks like this, as root (here, dealing with the ALF.kext):

# cd /System/Library/Extensions/
# mv ALF.kext ALF.kext.10A96 (note: for mv/rename, I use “10A96” as suffix to help me mark the original file from my 10A96 install)
# cp -R /Volumes/[[Leopard\ Install\ Source]]/System/Library/Extensions/ALF.kext .
# chown -R 0:0 ALF.kext (sets correct ownership defaults)
# chmod -R xxx ALF.text (where “xxx” is set to whatever other contents in the same directory already have — often 755, sometimes 775, less so 644)

That’s basically it. Now I’ll have a ALF.kext.10A96 and an ALF.kext in place, and the system will ignore the 10A96-suffix item(s).

View attachment 1993205

In short, I now have hundreds of items on my SL-PPC system with that .10A96 suffix (peppered with a couple of other suffixes from other sources).

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
This is very helpful, thank you for detailing this! My resourcefulness in the command line is fairly limited (more like none), unfortunately. I will keep it in mind in the future. It is good to know that I can do all of this from Terminal, so maybe I can do the whole thing in one go in SL (w/o reboot in between) and avoid bugs in the 10A190 Finder.
 
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tensixturtle said:
Yes, I will try to do that. I had originally done this but Bluetooth was only half-functional. The menu in the menu bar wouldn't work and the preference pane wouldn't open. The iMac was discoverable, however. I think I have been remembering my chown and my chmod commands for every file.


I have not replaced the preference pane with the one from 10.5.8. I had in the past but no way would it work for me. It wouldn't open and System Preferences ended up hanging. Then, I couldn't get the 10A190 one back, the only one that opened. I had to re-install, although there would have been a better way to do it probably.


This is very helpful, thank you for detailing this! My resourcefulness in the command line is fairly limited (more like none), unfortunately. I will keep it in mind in the future. It is good to know that I can do all of this from Terminal, so maybe I can do the whole thing in one go in SL (w/o reboot in between) and avoid bugs in the 10A190 Finder.
Click to expand...
@tensixturtle To be clear, you shouldn’t be replacing system files within the running OS, you need to be doing this from the command line while booted into your Leopard installation. Attempting to rename and then replace system components, while the system is running, may be the cause of some of the errors you have experienced.
 
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ChrisCharman said:
Sorry @barracuda156 i’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me?
Click to expand...

Sorry for a confusing question. I mean, did you or anyone already try to make 10A222 bootable on PPC by means of porting certain components from 10A190? Possibly, first installing 10A222 on Intel Mac and then tweaking it to fix for PPC.

ChrisCharman said:
you need to be doing this from the command line while booted into your Leopard installation.
Click to expand...

For whatever reason, this is exactly what did not work for me. (I mean, I know it should work, but…)
 
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ChrisCharman said:
@tensixturtle To be clear, you shouldn’t be replacing system files within the running OS, you need to be doing this from the command line while booted into your Leopard installation. Attempting to rename and then replace system components, while the system is running, may be the cause of some of the errors you have experienced.
Click to expand...
@ChrisCharman Sorry, I was unclear; I replaced files from Leopard and was doing permissions from SL. Perhaps I should be doing both from Leopard then.

Thanks
 
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tensixturtle said:
@ChrisCharman Sorry, I was unclear; I replaced files from Leopard and was doing permissions from SL. Perhaps I should be doing both from Leopard then.

Thanks
Click to expand...
You may find that some of the changes you made that wouldn’t work or prevented the OS from booting to the desktop, were because the ownership and permissions were incorrect. System components must have the correct values set in order for the operating system to recognise and use them before they will be loaded. There’s no harm in setting them again once you’ve reached the desktop, but replacing the files and then booting without first doing the above is almost always going to result in some form of crash or hang.
 
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barracuda156 said:
Sorry for a confusing question. I mean, did you or anyone already try to make 10A222 bootable on PPC by means of porting certain components from 10A190? Possibly, first installing 10A222 on Intel Mac and then tweaking it to fix for PPC.



For whatever reason, this is exactly what did not work for me. (I mean, I know it should work, but…)
Click to expand...
Too many components that are closed source are intel only, so though it maybe possible to replace all of those with the 10A190 versions, there would be little point given that the system would basically still be 10A190. My approach is to just update 10A190 with parts that can be updated from later builds, or build from source. To me this is a more logical approach, by improving on something that already works.

With regard to your process for replacing components and it not working from another OS - did you make sure that the ‘ignore ownership on this volume’ checkbox was set correctly on the 10A190 partition?
 
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ChrisCharman said:
Yeah i’ve managed to build a number of projects as universal but haven’t tested them on a PowerPC machine yet - will update you soon.
Click to expand...

I can finally confirm that PPC binaries build and run on 10A190 on Intel (as they should, anyway). Rosetta appears in 10A222.

By the way, do you have an idea why Darwinbuild is failing on PPC? There is nothing arch-specific in the source code. The single file that sets arch for Darwinbuild itself is prefix.xcconfig and it’s plain text. It does not seem to use some advanced fancy stuff like atomic operations, no assembler, it should be completely trivial. But it does not work.
 
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barracuda156 said:
I can finally confirm that PPC binaries build and run on 10A190 on Intel (as they should, anyway). Rosetta appears in 10A222.

By the way, do you have an idea why Darwinbuild is failing on PPC? There is nothing arch-specific in the source code. The single file that sets arch for Darwinbuild itself is prefix.xcconfig and it’s plain text. It does not seem to use some advanced fancy stuff like atomic operations, no assembler, it should be completely trivial. But it does not work.
Click to expand...
Yeah they work under Rosetta on my intel machine as well, i just haven’t tested if they work on an actual PowerPC machine yet.

I am as perplexed as you are with regard to Darwinbuild not working, it’s frustrating but fortunately it isn’t essential, it is just more inconvenient to manually build AOSP.
 
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ChrisCharman said:
Yeah they work under Rosetta on my intel machine as well, i just haven’t tested if they work on an actual PowerPC machine yet.

I am as perplexed as you are with regard to Darwinbuild not working, it’s frustrating but fortunately it isn’t essential, it is just more inconvenient to manually build AOSP.
Click to expand...

BTW the earlier version may/should build, but atm fails due to our openssl being too new for it, with these errors: https://localcoder.org/evp-md-ctx-error-storage-size-of-ctx-isn-t-known
I tried changing those instances in a way suggested online:
Code: 
-    EVP_MD_CTX ctx;
+    EVP_MD_CTX *ctx;
+    ctx = EVP_MD_CTX_new();
However it failed. Do you know how to rewrite it otherwise? Other than that, perhaps patching out -Werror may be needed (done locally).
 
The patch for the latest gcc11 (11.3.0) to build on 10A190: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ta.2332711/page-4?post=31064521#post-31064521

P. S. I made an experiment dropping crt change, because I pulled crt1.10.6.o from 10A222 onto its place in 10A190. Apparently it worked with no issues, both gcc11 and libgcc11 built in this manner work properly. (Notice, however, that I cannot advise doing the same unless you are eager to risk having to rebuilt the compiler.)

P. P. S. The new libgcc11 has a different layout of dylibs, and if you have earlier version of gcc10 using libgcc provided by libgcc11, upgrading libgcc11 will break gcc10. It will need to be rebuilt too.
 
Bumping this thread a little after a quiet little spell.

I’ve been busy with other life things and haven’t been able to throw much time and focus on SL-PPC stuff since last month. One of those things, topically speaking, has included a rearrangement of my home network (not terribly exciting, but it is what it is).

But… I thought it might be fun to share how quiet and unexciting running 10A96 on a A1138/A1139 PowerBook G4 can be. I happened to look up to see this earlier and made a screen cap. It’s not the first time I’ve seen how uneventful this combination can be, but it’s the first time I’ve thought to screen-cap it and share.

Hopefully before too long things should settle down a bit and I can return to working on that Clouded Leopard 10A96 updater. :)


1652419792268.png
 
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