The MorphOS Thread

[yafflehk]

I have a Mac mini g4 with an ssd with three partitions, OSX, OS9 and an empty one I'd like to put Morphos onto. However, during the install process there doesn't seem to be a way to identify the unused partition, the names that show up when booting Mac OS don't appear in the installer or any of the tools on the install CD What can I do to identify the empty partition??

 

[Methanoid]

If you work it out please document it... I've got same and would love to triple boot it (or quad with Debian)

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

What can I do to identify the empty partition??

Format it to some filesystem, which you definitely recognize.

 

[pipetogrep]

I have a Mac mini g4 with an ssd with three partitions, OSX, OS9 and an empty one I'd like to put Morphos onto. However, during the install process there doesn't seem to be a way to identify the unused partition, the names that show up when booting Mac OS don't appear in the installer or any of the tools on the install CD What can I do to identify the empty partition??

You could recognize it by size.

 

[yafflehk]

All three partitions are, unfortunately, the same size. My penchant for symmetry trips me up again

 

[Bug-Creator]

Not sure what you actually did, but this should still be true (start at step 3).

You need to make sure to have 1 partition (DHO: in the guide) set to HFS (no +) and another bigger one to SFS which will be your system disk.

As for which is which, the order should be the same but you can set the "free" one to "FAT" or something distinct under OSX to be safe.

 

[yafflehk]

What format would work best for Morphos?

 

[Bug-Creator]

Just do FAT as you need to:
- split into 2 for the small boot drive
- format the big one to SFS which OSX does not undertstand

So do that and boot from the MorphOS CD, select "custom layout" in the installer and follow the guide.

 

[Hughmac]

I downloaded the latest iso of MorphOS, 3.18, and the DVD I made boots fine on my 15" PowerBook G4 1.5
However, I installed Morph to a 64GB SSD in a firewire enclosure, with no errors, but it boots to a white screen and nothing more.
Can anyone confirm whether on not Morph can boot from firewire please?

Cheers

Hugh

 

[danielktdoranie]

I downloaded the latest iso of MorphOS, 3.18, and the DVD I made boots fine on my 15" PowerBook G4 1.5
However, I installed Morph to a 64GB SSD in a firewire enclosure, with no errors, but it boots to a white screen and nothing more.
Can anyone confirm whether on not Morph can boot from firewire please?

Cheers

Hugh

Not to a smart arse but I think you have your answer buddy ;-)

I have installed MorphOS 3.18 to an internal PATA IDE SSD but never to an external FireWire hard drive.

 

[Hughmac]

Thank you for the most unhelpful answer so far

I was looking for some advice from someone who actually knows

Cheers

Hugh

 

[danielktdoranie]

Thank you for the most unhelpful answer so far

I was looking for some advice from someone who actually knows

Cheers

Hugh

You’re welcome!

Have you considered contacting the MorphOS support team directly to confirm one cannot run MorphOS from an external FireWire drive? (support@morphos-team.net)

I mentioned that I use solid state IDE drives and can confirm they DO work with MorphOS (albeit internally in my experience) just to help you eliminate SSD drives as being the reason you can’t boot.

Common sense here: if you able to install MorphOS on to a FireWire drive but it’s not booting that’s it’s because it probably isn’t supposed to work. You know your FireWire port, cable and drive work (as you were able to install MorphOS onto your FireWire drive) so you can eliminate your hardware as being the cause if your problem.

OpenFirmware controls what drives your PowerBook boots to: my guess is it is expecting a file to be on FireWire drive that’s not there.

Assuming your solid state drive in your FireWire is a 2.5 inch drive, I would take it out of that enclosure and pop it into your PowerBook and try to boot from it. If it works and boots, we know the MorphOS install is good, by process of elimination we can determine it to be Open Firmware issue. (As we know all the hardware works).

As you may or may not know the PowerBook 15 inch is a pretty easy Mac to swap hard drives in and out of (unlike the iBook G4). I personally swap SSD IDE drives in and out of my personal PowerBook 15 inch (Mac OS X and MorphOS drives)

I know the opposite will work: installing MorphOS to your internal drive and installing Mac OS X Tiger to an external FireWire drive and booting from it.

Good luck!

 

[Hughmac]

Thanks for the reply; I’ve been holding off opening up my PowerBook so far but as you say I might as well give it a go.

I currently have a 128GB SSD in with Leopard installed just as I like it, a good CCC backup which I know boots from FireWire, plus a spare 256GB SSD which I could plonk in and try a dual boot Morph / Leo system - I’ve read the relevant pdf and it doesn’t seem too difficult a process.

Either that or put the 64GB into the PowerBook and use the Leo system from FW.

I will give it some consideration for a week or so then get going on it 😁

Cheers

Hugh

 

[danielktdoranie]

Thanks for the reply; I’ve been holding off opening up my PowerBook so far but as you say I might as well give it a go.

I currently have a 128GB SSD in with Leopard installed just as I like it, a good CCC backup which I know boots from FireWire, plus a spare 256GB SSD which I could plonk in and try a dual boot Morph / Leo system - I’ve read the relevant pdf and it doesn’t seem too difficult a process.

Either that or put the 64GB into the PowerBook and use the Leo system from FW.

I will give it some consideration for a week or so then get going on it 😁

Cheers

Hugh

MorphOS is a pretty snappy OS (more responsive than Tiger or Leopard IMHO) and if you have any Amiga experience the UI windowing works in a much similar way, only drawback to MorphOS is the €79 cost.

I’d be happy to replicate your intended install of booting MorphOS from a FireWire drive but sadly I own no FireWire enclosure

 

[Hughmac]

No Amiga experience whatsoever, but I have a plethora of FireWire external caddies as I find them invaluable for moving files around and backing up both PPC and Intel Macs quickly.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[danielktdoranie]

Okay keep in mind the UI and windows on screen don’t work in the same way as they do in macOS, Microsoft Windows, or Linux.

You don’t have to use the command line interface (Shell/AmigaDOS) but I would look up some basic commands.

Shell Commands - MorphOS Library

library.morph.zone

The Amiga OS consists of a few parts. The core OS is AmigaDOS (nothing to do with Microsoft DOS just the same acronym, Disk Operating System) that is a port of an old Unix competitor out of Cambridge called TRIPOS… it is true preemptive multitasking (like Unix or Mac OS X) you can have several Shells and programs running at once, it’s almost as powerful as Unix (you can pipe commands).

The GUI is called “Intuition” and file manager and other GUI programs that run on top of Intuition are called “WorkBench”.

As AROS (MorphOS is basically an AROS distribution) is open source, these various elements are renamed but the principal of how the OS is constructed is more or less the same.

A lot of Mac users install MorphOS but as they don’t know how to use it uninstall it.

I suggest taking the time to learn how to use it, it’s made my PowerPC Macs daily drivers again. It’s very fast, I use it for pretty much everything but YouTube

 

[AdamBuker]

If I could find a capable video editing solution that ran on MorphOS that was comparable to Final Cut 6, I would consider making a serious effort to daily drive it. I was able to run it on my PCIe G5 using the aftermarket Radeon card. It is as fast as everyone says. It’s just a shame that there isn’t enough powerful creative software to take full advantage of the speed.

 

[danielktdoranie]

If I could find a capable video editing solution that ran on MorphOS that was comparable to Final Cut 6, I would consider making a serious effort to daily drive it. I was able to run it on my PCIe G5 using the aftermarket Radeon card. It is as fast as everyone says. It’s just a shame that there isn’t enough powerful creative software to take full advantage of the speed.

To be honest with you the G5 is overkill for MorphOS. MorphOS it is a 32-bit operating system so it’s not going to property utilise a 64-bit processor: you’re leaving half your registers unused. It makes even less sense if you have a dual G5. Also MorphOS is limited to 2GB RAM.

Frequently on forums and in YouTube videos I see Amiga fans building the “ultimate G5 Mac” for MorphOS and laugh, I explain the above and that they are essentially wasting electricity and they get bent out of shape.

If you own a G5 I’d stick with Mac OS X or Linux.

I know nothing about editing video, but you’re editing video on a G5 Mac? I imagine that to be slow, glacial speeds slow, compared to an Apple Silicon or Intel Mac, right? Why use a G5 for video editing? Genuine question.

 

[wicknix]

To be honest with you the G5 is overkill for MorphOS

To be fair, while your points about G5’s being “too much” for MorphOS might be true, there is still a noticeable difference when it comes to web browsing and video streaming. The G5’s don't break a sweat at all while the g4’s struggle a slight bit. My 1.6ghz single cpu G5 runs MOS seemlessly. My 1.5ghz mac mini is fine with MOS for most things, but it does not handle cpu intensive tasks nearly as well. I much prefer the G5 with MOS over the G4’s, including my 1.67ghz PowerBook with 2gb ram and 128mb vram. I'd rather have too much than not enough.

 

[AdamBuker]

I know nothing about editing video, but you’re editing video on a G5 Mac? I imagine that to be slow, glacial speeds slow, compared to an Apple Silicon or Intel Mac, right? Why use a G5 for video editing? Genuine question.

I mostly edit 1080p and 4k footage. While my M1 MacMini is certainly an order of magnitude faster, my G5 is decently capable of handling the footage I edit. I transcode everything to either Apple Intermediate Codec or ProRes as both playback well enough and I have plenty of extra internal and external storage space for the extra storage they require. I like my G5 as I have a stable workflow that is not going to be subject to updates or changes breaking anything. I am quite familiar with Final Cut Pro 6 and Logic Pro 8. I have the modern equivalents on my Apple Silicon macs, but I enjoy creating with my old PPC macs better. It also helps that the modern internet is a pain on these machines as I am less likely to get distracted. This is also why I prefer to use my Apple //e for my fiction writing. It’s the ultimate distraction-free tool.

 

[Bug-Creator]

To be honest with you the G5 is overkill for MorphOS. MorphOS it is a 32-bit operating system so it’s not going to property utilise a 64-bit processor: you’re leaving half your registers unused. It makes even less sense if you have a dual G5. Also MorphOS is limited to 2GB RAM.

Thats just not how any of that works....

1. 64Bit as an advantage in computing, well that would refer to a 64Bit data bus something PPC had at least since the 604 (the 603 could do some 64bit types internally), support/usage is decided by the compiler not the OS

2. 64Bit addressing, means every time you hit memory you will have to keep track of 32 extra bits which if anything is less efficient (one of the reason why MS-DOS/Win kept the 16Bit/64k segmented addressing for so long) but I doubt it will make enough difference to be measured in any way.
Most used G5s you find today were never expanded beyond 2.5GB meaning that the upper 32Bit will also be pointless 0s no matter what. If you do have an app that uses >4GB on such a system(hitting swap), efficiency has already left the chat. If you do have >4GB and run (in OSX/Linux) apps that don't need more the 4GB each these apps will see all addresses with the upper 32 bit set to 0, the MMU will translate to proper 64 (well more like 36) bit addresses without using any "public" registers. Every once in a while the OS will have to deal with 64bit while setting up those MMU tables but thats all about.

The G5 being "64Bit" was just a meaningless marketing gag about as relevant as every CPU these days being "A1" when real AI is almost exclusively done on GPUs.


What is true is that MorphOS is "wasting" the 2nd CPU/core but that is merely fine print when talking about a 20+ years downscaled server chip that even back than was anything but "efficient".

 

[Doq]

To be honest with you the G5 is overkill for MorphOS. MorphOS it is a 32-bit operating system so it’s not going to property utilise a 64-bit processor: you’re leaving half your registers unused. It makes even less sense if you have a dual G5. Also MorphOS is limited to 2GB RAM.

Saying a G5 is overkill for MorphOS is synonymous to saying an i9 is overkill for Haiku.

Even if you consider the bitness of MorphOS or even the RAM limit, a G5 is still faster raw than a G4. Maybe you can't have multiprocessing on it, but if you got a dual proc machine, especially at the higher clocks, the one proc is still gonna be markedly faster than the fastest of G4s-- even aftermarket G4s; much the same way as the i9 being faster for Haiku than a Pentium M. Just because the OS is lightweight and easy on older slower processors doesn't mean you can't get more performance out of a faster processor.

While I'm here....

The G5 being "64Bit" was just a meaningless marketing gag about as relevant as every CPU these days being "A1" when real AI is almost exclusively done on GPUs.

The AI marketing isn't entirely meaningless. Frivolous, probably, but not totally meaningless.

CPUs that are advertised as "AI" usually will contain an NPU-- AI hardware acceleration-- on chip. CPUs have plenty of hardware accelerators on it from AES encryption to H.264 video encoding and decoding. It just so happens that AI hardware acceleration is highly marketable in the current landscape, so marketing is taking advantage.

 

[Bug-Creator]

The AI marketing isn't entirely meaningless.

1 in 1000 users will do AI stuff on the CPU instead of the GPU.

Just like some G5 users back in the day may have maxed out to 8/16GB and actually needed it.

As for the G5 being faster than a G4, once you bring them to the same clock it's more a hit and miss depending on the specific benchmark.

 

[Hughmac]

I downloaded the latest iso of MorphOS, 3.18, and the DVD I made boots fine on my 15" PowerBook G4 1.5
However, I installed Morph to a 64GB SSD in a firewire enclosure, with no errors, but it boots to a white screen and nothing more.
Can anyone confirm whether on not Morph can boot from firewire please?

Cheers

Hugh

And the answer is... yes MorphOS will boot and run from firewire - it's just that in my case the FW enclosure I first tried was faulty

This is being posted from Morph 3.18 using an SSD mounted in a different FW enclosure and booted from a PowerBook G4 1.5

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Doq]

And the answer is... yes MorphOS will boot and run from firewire - it's just that in my case the FW enclosure I first tried was faulty

This is being posted from Morph 3.18 using an SSD mounted in a different FW enclosure and booted from a PowerBook G4 1.5

Cheers

Hugh

Interesting find. I wonder how a licensed copy would play being booted on different machines. Probably no different from a drive swap but I do remain curious.