Sorbet Leopard - Your Power Mac Unleashed

[Aggedor]

Installed Sorbet Leopard on my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 (which I upgraded with a 128GB SSD) and have been impressed with how snappy it is.

My machine has an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 128 MB RAM (must have been a custom order, as this model is supposed to have the 64MB RAM card). I installed the ATI graphics drivers (ATI_Rage_Graphics_Drivers.zip), but after that the machine would only boot to a blank blue screen, and rebooting I couldn't even get into the boot manager to select my Tiger partition. I could only fix it by re-installing the machine's old mechanical HDD, setting the startup disk to the Tiger install DVD, then swapping the drives back and erasing the Sorbet Leopard partition so I could start over.

Given Sorbet Leopard seems very fast as it is, I assume for some reason my machine doesn't actually need the graphics drivers install?

 

[z970]

How difficult do you think it would be to bring a modern Webkit engine to Leopard, like MorphOS has? Would it be possible to crowdfund a project like that, maybe convince the Wayfarer developer from MorphOS to build us a new usable JIT-enabled webkit browser? And even have a 64 bit build of it to take advantage of every last resource the G5 has to offer. I would pay for something like that and spread the word.

Unfortunately I cannot provide an itemized answer outlining the development steps required, but assuming AI isn't involved, my understanding is that it would likely require someone with years of professional programming experience to properly tackle it, and even for them it would not be a trivial task. On that note I don't think the Wayfarer developer will be able to do much since the MorphOS platform offers modern libraries and security protocols that current versions of WebKit depend on and Leopard very much lacks.

So without launching some type of grand (crowdfunded?) bounty campaign to attract qualified talent that can pick up where @internetzel left off, UXP is currently our best bet for modern web support. And since it already has actual GPU acceleration--one of WebKit's main strengths--that isn't so bad, especially if we can get the JIT finished and a TenFourFoxBox analogue running to reduce resource use even further on G4 systems. Both of which I believe @Jazzzny was either already working on or had plans for.

And unless it leverages certain G5-specific instructions not present on G4s to accelerate CPU-dependent tasks (similarly to i386 vs x86_64; not sure if it's actually the same case on ppc32 vs ppc64), the only real benefit of a 64-bit build would be it being able to address more than 2 GB of memory at the cost of consuming more memory for every operation, which wouldn't necessarily be a great idea considering the platform since most iMac G5s will only take up to 2 GB total and even a lot of lower end DDR-based Power Macs don't contain much more than that.

For that matter though, I do wonder how much farther back from 10.14 the folks at Kagi could potentially bring a version of Orion if someone threw enough funding at them...

Installed Sorbet Leopard on my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 (which I upgraded with a 128GB SSD) and have been impressed with how snappy it is.

My machine has an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 128 MB RAM (must have been a custom order, as this model is supposed to have the 64MB RAM card). I installed the ATI graphics drivers (ATI_Rage_Graphics_Drivers.zip), but after that the machine would only boot to a blank blue screen, and rebooting I couldn't even get into the boot manager to select my Tiger partition. I could only fix it by re-installing the machine's old mechanical HDD, setting the startup disk to the Tiger install DVD, then swapping the drives back and erasing the Sorbet Leopard partition so I could start over.

Given Sorbet Leopard seems very fast as it is, I assume for some reason my machine doesn't actually need the graphics drivers install?

Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

 

[Appleuser201]

Unfortunately I cannot provide an itemized answer outlining the development steps required, but assuming AI isn't involved, my understanding is that it would likely require someone with years of professional programming experience to properly tackle it, and even for them it would not be a trivial task. On that note I don't think the Wayfarer developer will be able to do much since the MorphOS platform offers modern libraries and security protocols that current versions of WebKit depend on and Leopard very much lacks.

So without launching some type of grand (crowdfunded?) bounty campaign to attract qualified talent that can pick up where @internetzel left off, UXP is currently our best bet for modern web support. And since it already has actual GPU acceleration--one of WebKit's main strengths--that isn't so bad, especially if we can get the JIT finished and a TenFourFoxBox analogue running to reduce resource use even further on G4 systems. Both of which I believe @Jazzzny was either already working on or had plans for.

And unless it leverages certain G5-specific instructions not present on G4s to accelerate CPU-dependent tasks (similarly to i386 vs x86_64; not sure if it's actually the same case on ppc32 vs ppc64), the only real benefit of a 64-bit build would be it being able to address more than 2 GB of memory at the cost of consuming more memory for every operation, which wouldn't necessarily be a great idea considering the platform since most iMac G5s will only take up to 2 GB total and even a lot of lower end DDR-based Power Macs don't contain much more than that.

For that matter though, I do wonder how much farther back from 10.14 the folks at Kagi could potentially bring a version of Orion if someone threw enough funding at them...



Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

Hey, with all the amazing things we've been able to get and bring to this long dead platform in this year alone, I'm definitely not willing to write off any idea. When I suggested PowerFox being brought to Tiger shortly after it was released to Leopard, many people thought it would be a bad idea/extremely difficult. Yet within a few weeks it was shown to be usable on Tiger with a fork called Machfox and soon after that @Jazzzny was able to port it officially with a very nice brushed metal design that looks better than the Leopard version. Same with bringing JIT over, that has been announced by him to be in the next big PowerFox update which will be fantastic.

Yes PowerFox is an exceptional achievement and the best browser we have on this platform, but personally I would want to see another WebKit browser for Leopard too. One that can also play YouTube better than any Mozilla/UXP based browser can.

 

[Aggedor]

Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

Ha, okay, I misread Rage and Radeon. LOL. Thanks 🙂

 

[barracuda156]

On that note I don't think the Wayfarer developer will be able to do much since the MorphOS platform offers modern libraries and security protocols that current versions of WebKit depend on and Leopard very much lacks.

AFAIK, the only issue if WebKit itself.

We got the latest libraries of almost everything that can possibly be relevant. For example:

Full Name: webkit2-gtk @2.52.4_0+minibrowser+x11

Extract Dependencies: xz

Build Dependencies:   cmake, ninja, gperf, perl5.34, pkgconfig, python313, ruby33, unifdef, clang-16

Library Dependencies: atk, at-spi2-atk, cairo, fontconfig, freetype, enchant2, geoclue2, glib2, gobject-introspection, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-gst-plugins-bad, gstreamer1-gst-plugins-base, gstreamer1-gst-plugins-good, gtk3, harfbuzz-icu, hyphen, icu, libavif, libjxl, libjpeg-turbo, lcms2, libepoxy, libgcrypt, libnotify, libpng, libsecret, libsoup, libtasn1, libxml2, libxslt, sqlite3, webp, woff2, zlib, mesa, xorg-libXt

Runtime Dependencies: adwaita-icon-theme

Literally everything of these is available, in the latest releases. (On powerpc gcc will replace clang, of course.)
I cannot check which libs Wayfarer is linked to, but it as long as it is C/C++, hardly anything will be lacking.

 

[Smithwick’s]

Since this in the Sorbet thread, @barracuda156 is there any potential for the upcoming new Sorbet revision by @z970 supporting PPC Ports to the same extent as Snow Leopard for 32 bit? A couple of my devices have some trouble with 10.6.8a but run Sorbet well and I'd love to have the functionality of Sorbet with the killer setup you have with PPC Ports.

I never entirely understood why the binaries work for SL but not on Sorbet or 32-bit stock Leopard. Darwin issue or something else entirely? Or user error (a very valid possibility lol)

 

[barracuda156]

Since this in the Sorbet thread, @barracuda156 is there any potential for the upcoming new Sorbet revision by @z970 supporting PPC Ports to the same extent as Snow Leopard for 32 bit?

If by “the same” you mean outcomes, that is technically impossible, since 10.5 does not have all capabilities of 10.6 on level of the kernel and SDK. No matter what, there will be some ports that work on 10.6 but cannot work on 10.5. (Of course, with some effort spent on it, number of such could be reduced.)

If you rather mean extent of testing/fixing, that’s feasible, but someone needs to do that. This is largely a matter of investing time and cpu cycles: in many cases fixing what is broken is technically trivial. Say, if breakages on 10.5 reduce to ports that need actual code to be fixed (and not just compiler choice adjusted, legacysupport portgroup added or alike), that already gonna improve things a lot.

A couple of my devices have some trouble with 10.6.8a but run Sorbet well

This is a matter worth bringing into a relevant thread. Quite possible those issues have solutions and maybe already known ones.
Fixing the set-up once may not be a fun thing to do, but likely to be incomparably faster than keeping testing and fixing stuff for 10.5 (and never getting result as good as on 10.6, since that’s impossible).

(Personally I also think this is the right direction of efforts. We gain more at lower cost by addressing issues in existing 10.6 image over support efforts for 10.5.)

I'd love to have the functionality of Sorbet with the killer setup you have with PPC Ports.

I never entirely understood why the binaries work for SL but not on Sorbet or 32-bit stock Leopard. Darwin issue or something else entirely? Or user error (a very valid possibility lol)

Binaries built for a later system aren’t expected to work on an earlier one in general case, it is not about SL vs L.
Why? Because they link to different system libraries, they use capabilities that may not exist on earlier systems etc.
You might be able to set deployment target to 10.5 and build on 10.6. This is not something generally tested, but in principle should be doable.

 

[z970]

Backported the Iowan font from current macOS to improve legibility in Safari reader view, and also added a toggle to alternate between a new light / dark mode at will, providing a more modern experience when reading articles or pages written with newer CSS that WebKit 604 can't render properly.

Like AquaWeb Plus, Safari also now uses the KaiOS user agent by default, moderately improving YouTube playback performance and slightly improving graphical animations (full screen transitions). Anecdotally, this also returns faster mobile versions on a handful of other sites that previously did not respond to the iPad user agent in Revision 1.5.

In completely unrelated news, I've just discovered that Apple themselves have now legitimized the slightly controversial practice of bumping the OS version number without concurrently modifying the kernel at all with the recent release of macOS Catalina 10.15.8 in February 2026, which shares the exact same XNU build as the final security update for 10.15.7 in 2022 and was such a minor update that they literally only renewed the security certificates and then called it a day.

It doesn't seem like something they would have usually done. Maybe they took inspiration from 10.5.9 (and 10.4.12) since we did it first? 😉

 

[barracuda156]

In completely unrelated news, I've just discovered that Apple themselves have now legitimized the slightly controversial practice of bumping the OS version number without concurrently modifying the kernel at all with the recent release of macOS Catalina 10.15.8 in February 2026, which shares the exact same XNU build as the final security update for 10.15.7 in 2022 and was such a minor update that they literally only renewed the security certificates and then called it a day.

It doesn't seem like something they would have usually done. Maybe they took inspiration from 10.5.9 (and 10.4.12) since we did it first? 😉

Well, the reason to object doing that with 10.5.8 is not “religious” but that it actually breaks some stuff in case of 10.5 with regard to third-party apps. Whether the same happens or not in case of Catalina is irrelevant.