I live in Brazil, computers selling for low prices are almost impossible to find. PowerPC Macs are kinda rare here now so they are also expensive.
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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs
- Thread starter Larsvonhier
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I live in Brazil, computers selling for low prices are almost impossible to find. PowerPC Macs are kinda rare here now so they are also expensive.
I understand that you are frustrated that your G5 was unable to boot after you installed @educovas disk image but let me remind you of something called personal responsibility. Nobody in this thread can be or will be held accountable for any damage caused to anybody else’s machines. You chose to download experimental software on your machine and neither @educovas nor anyone else owes you anything, so do not leave comments that are rude, demanding or disrespectful to any user on this thread or indeed this forum. The people taking their free time trying to create things for the community are doing this with goodwill and unless you wish to help or say thank you then i suggest you refrain from comments such as the above. Thank you
A fair point. We already have too few people who are both willing and able to do something. Discouraging contribution hurts everyone.
As I said, I live in Brazil. Those prices doesn't exist here. A G5 is usually 10x that.
I’m aware this may be a long shot, but it came to mind nevertheless:
In lieu of trying to find a Power Mac G5 of any revision or processor configuration, it might be worth a patient search for an iMac G5.
Here’s why:
Several iMac G5 models — basically, all but the very last series — met premature failure due to the capacitors in manufacturing circulation at the time these were assembled by Foxconn and others. In essence, this consigned a lot of those iMac G5s as junked prematurely, even in regions where Apple products came at an especial premium.
Fortunately, it is possible to replace those bad capacitors, even if it requires some DIY soldering iron work (and if one is willing to do that).
Should one of those non-working iMac G5s turn up, it may afford you a fairly inexpensive means to get your hands on a G5-architecutre unit for which you can repair the capacitors. They were, in general, more plentiful everywhere over Power Mac G5s. My first thought would be to check in with local recyclers, but I’ll defer to your knowledge of your local market.
I wouldn't be able to afford even a faulty machine lol
Russia was never particularly cheap for Apple hardware even in normal times. Though I am pretty sure you could get a used PowerMac for free there, if you are a developer. Community was helpful and perhaps still is.
To the matter: with PowerMacs the key thing is local availability, since shipping makes buying abroad rather meaningless regardless of prices. Unfortunately, local availability tends to be scarce in places, where Apple had little to no presence back then in early 2000s. Anything very scarce and still valued, even by a very few, won’t be cheap.
I’m a retail manager. The willingness to learn and get ‘stuck in’ means a lot.
Hi all, so i can now confirm that replacing the 10A222 kernel with the 10A222 DEBUG kernel allows the OS to boot on my previously unsupported system, and on the PowerBook G4 that successfully booted @educovas originally modified disk image. My guess would be that this may also work on G5 but I cannot test currently. My suspicion, as the debug kernel contains all the symbol files not found in the consumer kernel, is that there’s something missing from the system kext or missing symbols that are available in this version. If anyone would like to test at their own risk and discretion, the 10A222 debug kernel was shared and uploaded previously by myself in this thread and also with all other found builds and prepared disk images and debug kits uploaded to the Macintosh Repository Here
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I guess your problem with the release kernel was that I got all kexts from 10A190 so maybe one of the kexts wasn't loading due to missing symbols from the kernel and the debug kernel does have those like you said. Maybe you could figure out which kext had this problem and see if it's available on 10A222 with ppc code.
Good to see that it finally works for you and that QE/CI also works!
Did you copy the system kext from 10A190 as well? I believe the default debug kernel install only replaces the system kext, though there are debug kexts included in the .dmg as well if required. The debug kernel is not optimised, so it will be slower, this means that rather than ‘remove’ PowerPC support from 10.6 Apple may have just optimised it away which is why some PowerPC support remains. If the debug kernels, so far, are able to boot unoptimised on different hardware then it’s likely we will be able to compile a release version but optimised for PowerPC down the line, once we figure out what’s missing which is most likely hardware specific support and calls to intel only api’s and kexts that we may need to patch and/or rewrite and recompile.
The only kext from 10A222 is the system kext. Eventually I did get some other kexts. Possibly one kext that's used for your hardware and not mine, is having problems to load. This kext might be available for ppc in 10A222 so the solution could be to just use that kext instead of the one from 10A190. I just never tried to use more kexts from 10A222 because it works fine on my hardware.
The instructions are in the .dmg mate. Uploaded to Macintosh Repository with everything else: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/download.php?id=37820
Do you happen to remember what you had to replace in order to get a newer kernel to boot on PowerPC?
I'll have to search in my backups if I maybe can still find the sources.
Since I didn't have any 10.6 beta available at that time I only had the 10.5 kext tools available (at least I think that was the biggest problem when booting the 10.5 userland from a 10.6 kernel) - so everything related to kxld (I think that was what had fundamentally changed with 10.6) had to be replaced with code from 10.5 .
In the end it had booted into single user mode.
Most apps in /Applications lost ppc support and I've replaced with 10A190, except DVD Player that's from 10.5.8 because the one in 10A190 seems to be unstable (at least on my machine).
Finder is from 10.5.8, I could have used the one from 10A190 but I had to use 10.5.8 due to some problems with my QE/CI patch.
I hope you find that because I have no idea how to fix that lol
That’s interesting. Disk utility is very buggy in 10A190 but appears to work in your 10A222 build - i imagine it’s something replaced in /usr/bin that’s fixed the errors as the source for the disk management stuff was something i was working through a while back and some binaries were intel only.
How exactly did you manage to swap the Finder? I think this was attempted by at least one other contributor early on in this project to some success but hasn’t been repeated since - i was certainly presented with a non-functional desktop when i tried if memory serves. It’s also interesting that the 10.5.8 Finder is being used because the bug with mounting and ejecting disks still presents itself.