What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[lepidotós]

The hard way:
Turn off autoboot in Open Firmware, format the disk remembering to include a ~4MB HFS partition at the start for the bootloader and install, reboot using the USB drive's bootstrap to get into your hard drive's installed OS, build and install HFStools to be able to write to that partition so you can copy over the bootloader and a small rescue image, reboot to get into OFW again, turn autoboot back on and tell it to load the bootloader you copied over.
The easy way:
If you have a Mac OS X install media, use the disk utility to create at least three partitions, one being the bootloader partition which can also be a Mac OS X install in its own right if you have the room and want to, then copy the bootloader and small rescue image over to that first partition, leaving the other two for root and swap. Then install and tell Open Firmware to automatically boot via the NetBSD bootloader.
The easy way would not have been that much less convoluted than the hard way.​

 

[TheShortTimer]

The easy way would not have been that much less convoluted than the hard way.​

Neither of those routes particularly enthuse me.

I don't blame you for passing on it but thanks for detailing the process.

 

[Nightphase]

I updated all my outdated packages on MacPorts on my PowerBook G4 15" running Tiger. It took around 10 hours! (without gcc7 ofc)

 

[mac57mac57]

I updated my PowerMac G5 to Sorbet Leopard and then updated the Gopher server it runs to Gophernicus 3.0 (from 1.7).

The PowerMac G5, running the Gophernicus Gopher server, serves up The Happy Macs Macintosh Software Repository to the Internet (same content is also available at http://www.retro-computing.com).

Interested? Gopher over to gopher://happymacs.ddns.net.

Need a Gopher browser? Go to gophie.org and download Gophie, for any of Mac, Windows or Linux.

 

[Nightphase]

Thanks to the magic of MacPorts. I installed WindowMaker on my PowerBook G4 "15 running 10.4.11
I had to manually fix the windowmaker portfile due to it trying to use the gcc4.2 compiler (I had to use gcc7)
I then modified xinitrc from X11.app to run WindowMaker at startup and in full screen.
I had to fix PATH and WMPrefs to make all settings/applications work correctly, I also compiled wmclock to have a clock.
It runs pretty fast!

 

[Mercedes33]

Today and yesterday i Upgraded my Powermac g5 Quad with an Nvidia Quadro FX4500 . Now im useing it the hole day for simple brownsing on osx 10.5

Just a small question which Linux OS Supports on Powermac Steam and Spotify? Is there any operatingsystem Where i can Download Steam

 

[headlessmike]

Today and yesterday i Upgraded my Powermac g5 Quad with an Nvidia Quadro FX4500 . Now im useing it the hole day for simple brownsing on osx 10.5

Just a small question which Linux OS Supports on Powermac Steam and Spotify? Is there any operatingsystem Where i can Download Steam

Steam has never been available for PowerPC on any platform.

You're not going to find any way to run a Spotify app either, but there might be ways to get it to work with the web interface. This old thread might help: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/spotify-for-powerpc.2308482/

 

[Mercedes33]

But is it Not possible to make it trough wine possible? Like installing wine on ubuntu and then Start Steam?

Or maybe gta San Andreas ?

 

[headlessmike]

But is it Not possible to make it trough wine possible? Like installing wine on ubuntu and then Start Steam?

Or maybe gta San Andreas ?

That would work on an Intel Mac but PowerPC hardware won’t run x86 code without emulation like VirtualPC, which is far too slow to run any games from this millennium.

There were a number of games made for Mac OS X (and Mac OS in classic mode if you have Tiger installed) before 2005 or so that should run very well on your machine though. The original Halo is one example.

 

[Amethyst1]

There were a number of games made for Mac OS X (and Mac OS in classic mode if you have Tiger installed) [...]

It's not recommended to use Panther's or Tiger's Classic for games.

 

[headlessmike]

It's not recommended to use Panther's or Tiger's Classic for games.

It’s less optimal than Jaguar or earlier, but with a G5 quad it’s the only option.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks to the magic of MacPorts. I installed WindowMaker on my PowerBook G4 "15 running 10.4.11
I had to manually fix the windowmaker portfile due to it trying to use the gcc4.2 compiler (I had to use gcc7)
I then modified xinitrc from X11.app to run WindowMaker at startup and in full screen.
I had to fix PATH and WMPrefs to make all settings/applications work correctly, I also compiled wmclock to have a clock.
It runs pretty fast!
View attachment 2403489

This looks fabulous!

I guess in principle, you could run ANY desktop you could build in the same way... just have X11 run it full screen, hiding the Mac OS X underneath it

For blazing speed, I always (back in 2006!) ran Arch Linux with XFCE4 and the Rox file manager as my desktop. It was blazingly fast. I did see XFCE4 in the set of available MacPorts ports for Leopard. Hmmm...

Back then, I built an entire system around the theme of "light and fast". I wrote about it at the time in https://inverary.net/Linux/2006-lnf-awards.php. Still some interesting app selections there after all these years.

Note to the moderators: if the above paragraph violates site rules regarding promoting your own content, just let me know and I will remove it.

 

[rusavv]

Today I've been surprised of VNC compatibility across Macs so you can still connect from latest macOS Sonoma to Leopard! And even cooler is that you can do it backwards. This is the screenshot of my G4 mini with Leopard Server connected to Mac Studio with latest macOS. Using this for web browsing on G4 is a faster than runing InterWebPPC :-D

 

[Ryan Bremer]

Yeah, because the VNC protocol hasn't changed much

 

[Nightphase]

I have read about the tigersrc project by Nia Alarie. I have seen that it had some pre-built packages, so I wanted to test it out.
I tested both audio and video using ffplay and yt-dlp. It works great!

 

[Nightphase]

I tested DOSBox. Jazz Jackrabbit anyone?

 

[MarkC426]

I tested DOSBox. Jazz Jackrabbit anyone? View attachment 2407790

How did you get audio to work…?
I tried dosbox on my G4 (standard os) all worked except no sound.

 

[Nightphase]

How did you get audio to work…?
I tried dosbox on my G4 (standard os) all worked except no sound.

I ran these commands inside DOSBOX
config -set "cpu cycles=auto 7800 100%% limit 26800" config -set sblaster sbtype=sb16 config -set gus gus=false

 

[Dronecatcher]

I tested both audio and video using ffplay and yt-dlp. It works great!

You can save a few more CPU % by turning off the Terminal video stream feedback.

 

[Nightphase]

I successfully managed to compile squid5 on Tiger, to make @Wowfunhappy 's solution for fixing HTTPS issues on Intel Macs work on PowerPC. It works, but for some reason, Safari/Keychain doesn't accept the certificate that OpenSSL creates for squid. I keep seeing TLS errors when i try to go to Wikipedia or other HTTPS sites. I used curl with the --proxy and --cacert flags and it worked fine. Any help on this?

 

[Wowfunhappy]

I successfully managed to compile squid5 on Tiger, to make @Wowfunhappy 's solution for fixing HTTPS issues on Intel Macs work on PowerPC. It works, but for some reason, Safari/Keychain doesn't accept the certificate that OpenSSL creates for squid. I keep seeing TLS errors when i try to go to Wikipedia or other HTTPS sites. I used curl with the --proxy and --cacert flags and it worked fine. Any help on this?

Oh that's lovely! Did you do anything special to make it compile? I got Squid to compile once for Intel Tiger, but it was super crash prone to the point that it was unusable except for very isolated requests.

I don't recall having issues with Keychain. Are you using system SSL to generate the cert, or a newer OpenSSL from MacPorts? What happens if you use the system one? (I'm thinking maybe modern SSL generates a cert with "modern" features—no idea what that would mean specifically.)

 

[wicknix]

I successfully managed to compile squid5 on Tiger, to make @Wowfunhappy 's solution for fixing HTTPS issues on Intel Macs work on PowerPC

It's super crash prone on PPC Mac (works fine on ppc linux even though it's not needed). I had mucked with it for a year before giving up on it. It'll eventually spike CPU to 100% and spawn loads of child processes rendering the system unusable. Killing squid and restarting it works for a little while, then it crashes again.

 

[Nightphase]

Oh that's lovely! Did you do anything special to make it compile? I got Squid to compile once for Intel Tiger, but it was super crash prone to the point that it was unusable except for very isolated requests.

I don't recall having issues with Keychain. Are you using system SSL to generate the cert, or a newer OpenSSL from MacPorts? What happens if you use the system one? (I'm thinking maybe modern SSL generates a cert with "modern" features—no idea what that would mean specifically.)

I tried both, Safari won't use the Squid certificate at all. The squid.conf file looks correct though. (I used yours with changed filepaths). I just used MacPorts to install with squid5 with the "+openssl +ssl_crtd" flags. It worked just fine.

It's super crash prone on PPC Mac (works fine on ppc linux even though it's not needed). I had mucked with it for a year before giving up on it. It'll eventually spike CPU to 100% and spawn loads of child processes rendering the system unusable. Killing squid and restarting it works for a little while, then it crashes again.

When I first compiled it without "ssl_crtd", it would go to 100%. But after recompiling, it doesn't 100% for now. (It will probably do when I fix the certificate thing)

 

[Nightphase]

I just found about "Senuti" which lets me play my iPhone's Music Library thanks to MacFUSE

 

[wicknix]

But after recompiling, it doesn't 100% for now. (It will probably do when I fix the certificate thing)

Yeah, its fine just idling not being used. Once you set it up properly and browse a few pages it’ll barf and peg the cpu.