Sorbet Leopard - Your Power Mac Unleashed

[AphoticD]

I posted this on Macintosh Garden, but couldn't find any insight:

Is anyone one having major issue where the windowsserver and the loginwindow processes crash moments after login, preventing you from opening System Preferences, seeing any menu bar items on the right (clock, etc), shutting down or rebooting, and ultimately corrupting the drive?

I just got a PowerMac G5 (Late 2005) [specs below], and tried both a fresh restore from the Macintosh Garden download link, as well as cloning the Sorbet drive from my PowerMac G4, and even using my direct Xserve G4 Sorbet drive. Both installs get messed up after first boot, and the fresh restore doesn’t even load up (I had to load it up on anther computer to make the first user during setup, then putting it back into the G5 messed it up again).

I’ve been using Sorbet Leopard since the release on many different computers, this if the first time this is happening, and it’s pretty confusing. I’ve tried both traditional hard drives and SSDs, and the G5 is pretty bare bones, so I don’t think there’s anything weird about it. I can easily run Tiger and standard Leopard without any issues.

Specs:
PowerMac G5 (Late 2005)
2.0GHz Dual Core G5
9GB of PC-2 4200U (non-ECC) [All matching pairs, no odd module]
Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT [real Mac edition, not flashed]
SATA II drives I’ve tried: WD VelociRaptor 320GB HDD, OWC 3G 500GB SSD, Toshiba MK5059GSXP, some old 40GB Hitachi
I’ve even tired a SATA III PNY SSD7CS900 (these drives actually work on the G5’s SATA I without any issues, I'm now using 2 of these my boot drive for 10.5.8 and 10.4).

Thanks for any insights!

Have you tried Safe Boot? (Hold Shift key at boot)

Do you see anything in /private/var/log/system.log showing errors when the windowserver and loginwindow processes crash?

You could try letting it fail, then reboot into Single User Mode (Hold Cmd + S keys at boot) and dig into the logs, or (somehow) configure SSH and remote in, then tail -f the system.log file to monitor the log output from another Mac as you repeat the fail process on the G5.

I haven't tried Sorbet, but a well behaving Leopard would also report to /Library/Logs/CrashReporter via the spindump service with details about the crash. This service could have been stripped from Sorbet for a speed bump though...

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Thank you, I really appreciate your insight! I'm not using any of those themes though. On both the drive I cloned and the one I pulled from my Nerve, they did have themes via Magnifique, but the fresh copy I made did not. Very interesting though, maybe this is a graphics issue. I have almost the same PowerMac G5 as you too, though I have mixed RAM, and the 7800GT. You've given me a whole new path to explore!

I agree that it seems to be GPU/GUI related. My initial assumption was that the gui theme package had a component that the pmg5 did not like, but as you are having similar issues outside of the theming package, that points elsewhere - potentially the card itself. Do you have a different gpu you could swap in to see if the issue persists?

Either way, i wanted to document my a1117 PMG5 experience here as well so if others experience this or something similar, they are not alone and can contribute to the conversation and hopefully a collective tinkerer solution. I'd love to have the HiSi theme on my pmg5 if I could.

and Sorbet rocks years in. I still enjoy it.

 

[cdwilliams1]

I've got a QuickSilver G4 933 with 1.5g RAM, dual booting off 9.2.2 and 10.4.11 off a 128gb SATA SSD. Have a 2 channel SATA card, USB card, Wifi card, and both a GeForce 4 and ATI RV100 populating the slots.

I installed a 500gb SATA hard drive and restored Sorbet to it per the instructions. It seemed to go ok, but disk utility was not able to repair permissions. It gives an error "No valid packages installed".

Sorbet boots up when I choose it as a startup disk and the initial Mac OSX computer setup as well as the general text on the screen is all garbled. I had this problem before when I attempted to update to the official 10.5.4 dvd. In both cases the text is all messed up (see photos). So I stuck with my older version which does not exhibit this problem. I tried validating fonts with font book but they all come back ok/green. I have tried both video cards with a single monitor attached. Any other ideas of things to try? This problem does not occur when I boot back to 9.2.2 or 10.4.11 on the SSD.

 

[Angelgreat]

I wonder if 2024 will bring more improvement to Sorbet Leopard?

 

[AphoticD]

I wonder if 2024 will bring more improvement to Sorbet Leopard?

It’s essentially a community effort, so what would you hope to see? Throw some wishes out there and lets see what happens!

 

[Dronecatcher]

I wonder if 2024 will bring more improvement to Sorbet Leopard?

Like @AphoticD intimated, do all your customisations, add what apps you need, apply hacks, copy with CCC and you have Sorbet 2024.

 

[ojfd]

Reduce transparency to a minimum wherever possible?

 

[ojfd]

Does anyone, especially devels, know what the mechanism of drawing/rescaling of folder and application icons is? Maybe chopping off larger sizes, i.e. 512x512, will also make Finder snappier?

 

[AphoticD]

Does anyone, especially devels, know what the mechanism of drawing/rescaling of folder and application icons is? Maybe chopping off larger sizes, i.e. 512x512, will also make Finder snappier?

You could use CandyBar to replace your system icons with a 10.4 or older era icon set which does not have the larger 512x512 (or 256x256) assets and determine an increase in speed or not.

I can't be sure about Sorbet, but Leopard Finder appears to lazyload icon assets as needed. I assume it is not mapping the larger assets to memory at all until the user requests this.

Just quickly, I see;

1. Finder Icon view max icon size is 128x128
2. Finder Column view preview renders most icons at 128x128 (except for images, videos, PDFs, etc)
3. Quick Look renders the 256x256 assets for applications and documents which have no QL preview handler.
4. Cover Flow will render up to the 512x512 assets (of apps, folders, etc) and appears to be loading these on request (lazy)
5. Dock appers to render 128x128 at max zoom.
6. Application switcher HUD renders at 128x128

I imagine most users would never notice icons larger than 128x128 on a Leopard/Sorbet system.

The Icon Composer tool distributed with Xcode 3.1.4 for Leopard will allow you to open an existing .icns container and manually delete any of the larger assets. You could try deleting both 512x512 and 256x256 assets across most system icns files (/System/Library/CoreServices/) and then install over the default icons with CandyBar -- or just bring Tiger's icons over to Leopard, which only supply up to 128x128 assets as-is.

 

[ojfd]

Thank for your input, AphoticD!
My question was more of theoretical nature. In the past, out of pure intuition and remembering how custom icons slowed down Finder in OS7, I've deleted all icons assets larger than 128x128 using Icon Composer, when I modified my Yosemite. I thought that maybe something similar could be beneficial to Leopard users.

 

[AphoticD]

Thank for your input, AphoticD!
My question was more of theoretical nature. In the past, out of pure intuition and remembering how custom icons slowed down Finder in OS7, I've deleted all icons assets larger than 128x128 using Icon Composer, when I modified my Yosemite. I thought that maybe something similar could be beneficial to Leopard users.

Sure, it sounds like it might be worth investigating for Sorbet/Leopard. Did you see a speed boost in Yosemite?

 

[ojfd]

Sure, it sounds like it might be worth investigating for Sorbet/Leopard. Did you see a speed boost in Yosemite?

It's difficult to tell. I changed a lot of things simultaneously and it's difficult to pinpoint now which part contributed to what. Still, opening a new folder is not as snappy as in SL on identical machine.
I think Yosemite has additional animation layer, that can't be switched off easily - iPhone style scrolling, switching to full screen and all that sort of cr@p.

 

[gsteemso]

I have been using Sorbet Leopard for a couple of weeks now, and – as I want to USE it instead of having it look pretty at me – I have ignored all the "theme" frippery to focus on the actual system software.

So far it seems pretty solid, but I have encountered a not-so-minor issue with at least one of the updated dynamic library files it comes with (specifically, /usr/lib/libsqlite.3.0.dylib, version 10.7.0 – as opposed to the stock 9.6.0). For no reason I can see, the updated version – which I assume from the multi-megabyte increase in file size probably contains significant added features – only contains binary data for one of the four platforms that are supposed to be in it.

The ppc64, i386, and x86-64 code are all missing, meaning that on my PPC G5, I can't link natively against a shocking number of system libraries. (For some reason, using the CoreServices framework pulls in the totally unrelated SQLite library when it gets around to the networking routines!)

It seems likely to me that if one important binary has been stripped of these multi-platform facets, several others may well be in the same position. I'm having to jump through hoops, involving substituting the 10.5 SDKs from the "/Developer" directory, to get several of my personal works to compile at all; as such, I can't readily whip up something to do a comprehensive scan for any other such unless I find an entire day to devote to the problem.

Does anybody know if the guy who set Sorbet Leopard in motion had any specific thoughts on fat binaries like these?

 

[Dronecatcher]

So far it seems pretty solid, but I have encountered a not-so-minor issue with at least one of the updated dynamic library files it comes with

Monolingual (or similar) was used to strip intel code as far as I know. It's one of those optimisations that seems a good idea in theory but I personally felt no benefit unless you were using a tiny HDD.

You have to remember, Sorbet was set up to work on the author's Mac and unless you have the very same one, yours might not function the same - certain things have been stripped out and changed which wll damage the user experience for some (like if you actually wanted to use a built in modem.)

My advice for a serious user is install standard Leopard and get it working the way you want it to - might take you a few hours but you'll have a fully functioning OS every bit as fast.

 

[ojfd]

The ppc64, i386, and x86-64 code are all missing, meaning that on my PPC G5, I can't link natively against a shocking number of system libraries.

PPC processor can not use anything that's compiled for Intel. Something else must be wrong in your system.

 

[Dronecatcher]

PPC processor can not use anything that's compiled for Intel. Something else must be wrong in your system.

In this instance it means the ppc32 version is present and the G5 is looking for the ppc64.

 

[ww2_1943]

I have been using Sorbet Leopard for a couple of weeks now, and – as I want to USE it instead of having it look pretty at me – I have ignored all the "theme" frippery to focus on the actual system software.

So far it seems pretty solid, but I have encountered a not-so-minor issue with at least one of the updated dynamic library files it comes with (specifically, /usr/lib/libsqlite.3.0.dylib, version 10.7.0 – as opposed to the stock 9.6.0). For no reason I can see, the updated version – which I assume from the multi-megabyte increase in file size probably contains significant added features – only contains binary data for one of the four platforms that are supposed to be in it.

The ppc64, i386, and x86-64 code are all missing, meaning that on my PPC G5, I can't link natively against a shocking number of system libraries. (For some reason, using the CoreServices framework pulls in the totally unrelated SQLite library when it gets around to the networking routines!)

It seems likely to me that if one important binary has been stripped of these multi-platform facets, several others may well be in the same position. I'm having to jump through hoops, involving substituting the 10.5 SDKs from the "/Developer" directory, to get several of my personal works to compile at all; as such, I can't readily whip up something to do a comprehensive scan for any other such unless I find an entire day to devote to the problem.

Does anybody know if the guy who set Sorbet Leopard in motion had any specific thoughts on fat binaries like these?

I had this issue when trying to run Geekbench 64bit and Chess.app.
Amethyst1 helped me work through it. You can read through it here- https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...leashed-revision-1-5-released.2300924/page-43

 

[AphoticD]

The ppc64, i386, and x86-64 code are all missing, meaning that on my PPC G5, I can't link natively against a shocking number of system libraries. (For some reason, using the CoreServices framework pulls in the totally unrelated SQLite library when it gets around to the networking routines!)

Can you run the app in question in 32-bit mode?



Nothing wrong with stock Leopard and a couple of tweaks via Onyx IMO.

Does anybody know if the guy who set Sorbet Leopard in motion had any specific thoughts on fat binaries like these?

I would think the fat binaries (and numerous frameworks) were stripped with the intention to speed things up, but I don’t believe there would have been any performance gain in stripping multi-arch support. A reduced footprint would be the only benefit there.

Considering the popularity of Sorbet, it would be great if z970mp did make a comeback and keep fine tuning the distro. I suppose anyone else could jump in to repackage in a non-lipo’d fat format, but that would depend on documentation of tweaks outside of the fat stripping.

 

[Amethyst1]

I would think the fat binaries (and numerous frameworks) were stripped with the intention to speed things up, but I don’t believe there would have been any performance gain in stripping multi-arch support. A reduced footprint would be the only benefit there.

#1,060

 

[AphoticD]

#1,060

Do you find this is a good change?

 

[Amethyst1]

Do you find this is a good change?

I haven’t used Sorbet so don’t know, but it causes the issue described in #1,263. Restoring 10.5.8‘s version (from e.g. the Combo update) fixes it — with the side-effect of breaking Sorbet’s updated Safari.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Predictably, Sorbet became the one-stop shop advice cliche for PowerPC users on Reddit - “throw a SSD in that bad boy and install Sorbet!” - yet they don’t seem to achieve anything other than install it.

 

[ediflorianus]

Most of the updates seem pretty nice, I did add manually everything I could, just not to install 5.9 by formatting my full drive that had 10.5.8 optimized. Sadly o dough desktop is snappier my overall xbench scores on G5 were lower than previous 10.5.8 I used for 10+ years, so I am not sure why... it makes little difference for me, as a user, but it is important to tell that perf.scores may slightly drop with all the added stuff sorbet has on top of your optimised 10.5.8.

L.E. Nevermind , today I scored a High score(98.4), usually its around 76-79...

 

[gsteemso]

#1,060

You are correct, that was the library which was missing its 64-bitness. I tried to replace it with a symlink to the original version (present in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/), but (as is obvious in hindsight) the libraries believe themselves to be stored in the original location and thus were too confused to load via symlink. When I did successfully replace it, the system got so confused by having an older revision of that file that it wouldn't boot at all. Given this issue and that I have no way of knowing what other vital things (e.g. the modem driver mentioned above – I don't use it but that doesn’t mean nobody does) were cut in the construction of this single-system-optimized "upgrade", I have abandoned it for the time being in favour of the old 10.5.8 release.

For some reason, I just blindly assumed that someone going so far as to bump the version number of a general-purpose OS would have done so for a general-purpose release of that OS. Very disappointing, but the idea is too important to ignore; I will have to return to this when I have time to do some digging and submit fixes. (At the moment, I'm occupied with doing investigation of that nature for various things related to the Tigerbrew fork of Homebrew, and I can't predict when that might change.)

 

[ediflorianus]

You are correct, that was the library which was missing its 64-bitness. I tried to replace it with a symlink to the original version (present in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/), but (as is obvious in hindsight) the libraries believe themselves to be stored in the original location and thus were too confused to load via symlink. When I did successfully replace it, the system got so confused by having an older revision of that file that it wouldn't boot at all. Given this issue and that I have no way of knowing what other vital things (e.g. the modem driver mentioned above – I don't use it but that doesn’t mean nobody does) were cut in the construction of this single-system-optimized "upgrade", I have abandoned it for the time being in favour of the old 10.5.8 release.

For some reason, I just blindly assumed that someone going so far as to bump the version number of a general-purpose OS would have done so for a general-purpose release of that OS. Very disappointing, but the idea is too important to ignore; I will have to return to this when I have time to do some digging and submit fixes. (At the moment, I'm occupied with doing investigation of that nature for various things related to the Tigerbrew fork of Homebrew, and I can't predict when that might change.)

Hi,if you still have the old 10.5.8, reput that here, and I will edit this post ,today, l8ter with all the optimization I did on mine manually. It's worth the time &effort, I had 4 tb of old data with no intention of formating, and there was no update kit(like 10.5.6 to 10.5.8)so I did 90% of sorbet mods manually.

L.E.
1. Use Disk Utility or Diskwarrior to verify&repair disk permissions(*maybe best done from recovery mode?)
2.Access Macintoshgarden for everything you may need, under the Sorbet link (I just download the Sorbet Plus & supplementary update) - then run them (or after TigerSierraTheme install). it also has sorbetappstore in there.. maybe it's in the R15 DMG , just open that , under apps > find *Sorbet AppStore & Sorbet Tools (that's all you should need from the os.dmg , if you need anything aditional in particular just search the .DMG and copy to current install) I just opened R15.dmg up and run all the stuff I needed from Sorbet Tools (they optimise some functions of your current 10.5.8).
3. Start with TigerSierraTheme or/& LeopardRebirth
4.AuroraSuite & AuroraTrimceleator
5.OnyX 2.0.6
6.PPCAppStore (we need to tell the man to add a few more apps there).
7.Shuriken (should come loaded with a appstore)
8.A Webkit for safari
9.Some browsers TenForFoXPEP & TenForBird7450
10. Restart a few times when you need, and
11.Re Do the permissions verify/repair
-And your' DONE!
and last if you have ATi... ATi Rage Graphics Drivers
12.Xbench to test your rig-before & after. (or in mid-process).