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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

I looked into dedicating more tasks and possible activities to my Power Mac G5 (running Sorbet) other than simply letting me play older games. In the process, I found out how to get an older version of Scrivener 2 from Macintosh Garden to run on it. I was worried I wouldn't be able to use it ever again because I have a registration key I bought years ago back in 2014 when I used Mavericks, but the company said on their legacy downloads page that the validations servers for it were no longer working, so this Macintosh Garden version cancels that problem out for me. Now I get to write fiction like I'm a college senior again!

On top of that, I also installed OmniFocus so I can experiment with how productive I can keep myself by using this older software instead of relying on more distraction-laden modern systems. I'm honestly excited to see how this turns out.

That aside, I copied my personal music collection from my main desktop over to it to play on iTunes.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
Today, I added Apple's Runway Card (Combined Bluetooth and WiFi) to my air-cooled G5 Quad ("Air Quad"):

View attachment 2522986

Installed Runway Card

This was a finicky and difficult installation... I had to fight against all too typical Apple engineering of the period. Two nearly microscopic antenna cable ends have to be attached to two equally microscopic connectors on the Runway card, and then the result has to be screwed into place against the PCI Divider plate of the Quad with tiny, tiny screws. Jewelers screwdrivers are required all around! Why, oh why, did Apple have to make the late 2005 G5s so difficult to maintain?


It took me over 15 minutes to connect the two cables to the Runway card. In addition to their connectors being impossibly small, the cables themselves are also quite short and are "anchored" behind the motherboard, requiring you to work directly over the motherboard, with screws so small that you can barely see them. God forbid that you should ever drop one of these tiny screws!

In the end, success. I am blessed to still have an old Apple Airport Extreme WiFi base station, and while at least initially I could not get the Runway card to connect to my WiFi6 home router, it could and did connect to my Airport Extreme router, which is of a similar age and technology.

View attachment 2522988
Apple Airport Extreme WiFi Router


With this setup in place, I tinkered with both the router (via Apple's Airport Utility) and the Runway Card (via System Preferences) until I got the Runway card (and my Quad!) to connect to my main home network.

I am now WiFi connected on my LCS Quad. The speed is consistent with the age of the card and the WiFi technology of the day (WiFi G, 54 Mbps), but it is fun to see it all work.
Click to expand...

By the way, it is impossible to use AirPort Extreme as an access point for the Mac? AirPort Express does that, but I failed to configure Extreme to do the same.
 
I have fixed Kate!

kate_katana.png
 
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@JackAHyde, you might wish to consider turning this question around. Perhaps it should not be "what can I do with my G5?" and instead should be "what can't I do with my G5?".

Approached this way, you will see that you can do almost everything with your G5, absent the occasional web site that get its back up in the air about browser versions...

Use Sorbet and Aquafox and you will be great!
 
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mac57mac57 said:
@JackAHyde, you might wish to consider turning this question around. Perhaps it should not be "what can I do with my G5?" and instead should be "what can't I do with my G5?".

Approached this way, you will see that you can do almost everything with your G5, absent the occasional web site that get its back up in the air about browser versions...

Use Sorbet and Aquafox and you will be great!
Click to expand...
That's a good way of looking at it, actually. I'm going to keep that in mind moving forward with this.

Also, I am using Aquafox, but a lot of modern sites make it choke because my model is from 2003 and not the strongest one I could have gotten. I am, however, looking to later max out the RAM to its 8GB limit (I already bumped it from its stock 1.5GB to 5.5GB) and upgrade the GPU as an endgame thing.

Anyway, after waking up this morning, I installed XLD, the last version to support Leopard, to start splitting .cue files in my music library that previously weren't showing up in my iTunes library.
 
mac57mac57 said:
Thanks @barracuda156, I have downloaded the kate portfile and will have a go at building this on my newly completed Air Quad.
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I am not sure I was clear enough. If you build this within a standard MacPorts (or inside your own ports overlay), you need everything from katana directory aside of katana-extraapps and then install specifically katana-workspace (kate is a part of it).
Please do not try installing kate port, which exists in MacPorts, as long as the aim is to reproduce my set-up.
The official kate port uses standard KDE4, which a) will not build at all from current ports and b) will build with my fixes but kate crashes on launch when installed that way.

P. S. I will push a few tweaks soon to make it more compatible with the current upstream.
 
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OK, thanks @barracuda156 - in that case I will hold off and wait for further updates.

In the meantime, as GUI text editors for PPC Macs go, I like Smultron best. However, as the author of my own VE text editor, I am always interested in trying out other such offerings... if nothing else, they can be a great source of new feature ideas!
 
mac57mac57 said:
OK, thanks @barracuda156 - in that case I will hold off and wait for further updates.
Click to expand...

Will be done today, it is trivial, I wanted to allow using the old mpv, otherwise you will need to build two more of my ports (on the other hand, why not build a better and newer mpv?).

UPD. Done: https://github.com/macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports/commit/3217fed9751b70453567bbba1c04d1e840b708f1
If you use standard MacPorts, you may install `mpv-legacy` to satisfy the dependency.
 
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After seriously struggling to get Xcode installed on my Dual 2.0GHz Power Mac G5 for the past few days, I finally got MacPorts to run on it today. I never thought I'd feel so accomplished by being able to install and run something as simple as Neofetch on a machine this old.
 
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JackAHyde said:
After seriously struggling to get Xcode installed on my Dual 2.0GHz Power Mac G5 for the past few days, I finally got MacPorts to run on it today. I never thought I'd feel so accomplished by being able to install and run something as simple as Neofetch on a machine this old.
Click to expand...

What’s the issue though? It shouldn’t be that bad even with mainstream MacPorts.
 
barracuda156 said:
What’s the issue though? It shouldn’t be that bad even with mainstream MacPorts.
Click to expand...
MacPorts itself wasn't the issue. Rather, it was getting Xcode to play nice on my system. I downloaded Xcode half a dozen times from Apple's developer website, but it always gave me errors in one way or another before it would abort the installation. Eventually, I tried downloading with a different storage device to move it to the G5, but even that wasn't enough. The installation was hanging for three hours with CPU usage bobbing and almost maxed out during the whole duration.

I eventually tried using Pacifist just to install a fraction of what was in the Xcode package and see if that would work. After an exhausting installation time on that (and several errors I had to click "Continue" on), it finally finished and MacPorts started to work without a hitch.
 
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Set up and configured my new Cinema Display for the G5. Only thing I don't like is that there are these dust specks (I think?) beneath the screen. I'll probably take a crack at opening it up and cleaning it in the future, but I'll just enjoy what I have for now.

On a different note, I'm amazed at how well-supported the display is on this system. There are so many small options, color profiles, tweaks, and more than I expected to see.

PXL_20250627_164502991.MP.jpg
 
JackAHyde said:
Set up and configured my new Cinema Display for the G5
Click to expand...

I have a 30" Cinema HD display on my G5 Dual 2.3 GHz. I love it! I would get another one for my Air Quad, but they are pretty pricey even on eBay these days.

You are absolutely right - Apple built a wonderful set of support functions for the Cinema displays into Mac OS X.

Be sure to color calibrate it - it is a beautiful display image once calibrated.

Enjoy!
 
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mac57mac57 said:
I have a 30" Cinema HD display on my G5 Dual 2.3 GHz. I love it! I would get another one for my Air Quad, but they are pretty pricey even on eBay these days.

You are absolutely right - Apple built a wonderful set of support functions for the Cinema displays into Mac OS X.

Be sure to color calibrate it - it is a beautiful display image once calibrated.

Enjoy!
Click to expand...
Taking your advice, it does look quite nice calibrated, although I mostly picked the settings that make the light more white and less yellow. I saved it and am quite impressed with it so far. I'm even starting to do a better job ignoring the dust specks trapped under the screen at this point.

Also, I got quite a lot of use out of my Power Mac G5 today:
  • Played the Power PC edition of Minecraft (1.5.2, I believe) for half an hour
  • Started using iCal (offline) to schedule things
  • Played several of my iTunes songs
  • Did a lot of writing on Scrivener 2.5
  • Registered LegacyAI to get more features, letting me use it to look things up while I was writing in Scrivener
 
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Good job @JackAHyde! As some possible additional suggestions for what you could use your G5 for, here are some of the things I use my G5s for:

- Manage my iTunes music library and download it whenever I make an update to it, to the small set of iPods I have and use to drive the sound system in our house.

- Writing: everything from blog posts to the text of emails (which I then copy/paste into my email agent).

- Read and send emails, via the excellent TenFourBird email client (a PPC variant of Thunderbird) - it topped out at version 48.x (I think), but it is still the best PPC email client I am aware of.

- Serving Gopher! My G5 Dual hosts my Internet visible Vintage Macintosh software repository, accessable via Gopher (gopher://happymacs.ddns.net).

- Casual web browsing via v2.2 of the Aquafox browser (a PPC variant of Firefox, still actively maintained).

- Storing multiple large software repositories. As the author/operator of www.retro-computing.com, I maintain extensive libraries of vintage software for multiple different systems (Mac OS X, Apple IIGS, Linux, DOS, WFWG, Win 9x up through WinME). I need to store all that software somewhere - my G5s are the perfect spot!

- Anchoring my retro network, allowing my older Macs and PCs to communicate with a central server, which itself can communicate with my newer Macs. The G5s act as a bridge almost, from my older systems to my newer ones. Pretty much everything I own, old and new, can interact with Mac OS X (Sorbet) Leopard.

Honestly, the only thing I can't (easily) do on my G5s is web-based banking. With Sorbet and Aquafox I can do web-based banking, but it is just too slow to be useful. Other than that, I can do pretty much everything else I use computers for on my G5s. That is a strong testament to how powerful these machines are, even after 20+ years.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
Good job @JackAHyde! As some possible additional suggestions for what you could use your G5 for, here are some of the things I use my G5s for:

- Manage my iTunes music library and download it whenever I make an update to it, to the small set of iPods I have and use to drive the sound system in our house.

- Writing: everything from blog posts to the text of emails (which I then copy/paste into my email agent).

- Read and send emails, via the excellent TenFourBird email client (a PPC variant of Thunderbird) - it topped out at version 48.x (I think), but it is still the best PPC email client I am aware of.

- Serving Gopher! My G5 Dual hosts my Internet visible Vintage Macintosh software repository, accessable via Gopher (gopher://happymacs.ddns.net).

- Casual web browsing via v2.2 of the Aquafox browser (a PPC variant of Firefox, still actively maintained).

- Storing multiple large software repositories. As the author/operator of www.retro-computing.com, I maintain extensive libraries of vintage software for multiple different systems (Mac OS X, Apple IIGS, Linux, DOS, WFWG, Win 9x up through WinME). I need to store all that software somewhere - my G5s are the perfect spot!

- Anchoring my retro network, allowing my older Macs and PCs to communicate with a central server, which itself can communicate with my newer Macs. The G5s act as a bridge almost, from my older systems to my newer ones. Pretty much everything I own, old and new, can interact with Mac OS X (Sorbet) Leopard.

Honestly, the only thing I can't (easily) do on my G5s is web-based banking. With Sorbet and Aquafox I can do web-based banking, but it is just too slow to be useful. Other than that, I can do pretty much everything else I use computers for on my G5s. That is a strong testament to how powerful these machines are, even after 20+ years.
Click to expand...

Thanks for bringing up TenFourBird. I was interested in that once I read this post, but unfortunately, I can't seen to find a working download for it anymore. (Maybe I'm not looking hard enough?)

I also agree that the G5 can do so much even after two decades. I was able to pay for my LegacyAI license all from my G5 yesterday, albeit Aquafox took its sweet time to load the payment processor website. Now I can switch to the ChatGPT 4.x models and variants, and the responses look a lot more like something I'd see on a modern ChatGPT window.

Aside from that, I've continued writing blog content on the G5 again via Scrivener, and all while listening to music through iTunes.
 
Romain_H said:
Holy Moly, that'd be awesome
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It is likely doable, at least as the base goes (something like Webengine is broken across all platforms, there is no chance for that). However, it will be somewhat like Katana: bunch of functionality dropped and GUI via X11.
Still useful, if it gonna work for more than completely basic stuff, since it is really painful to fix modern code for Qt4, and I am now thinking it would have been easier to just fix Qt instead of fixing apps for Qt4 which are done by now.
 
I grew tired of having to download things on my Arch Linux machine to a flash drive just to move them over to my G5, so I looked into what I could do about this. I discovered that I could start a Samba server on my Linux machine to seamlessly and effortlessly share media to the G5 over local wired connection. I'm already stunned by how fast and efficient it is now. I was able to send more music to update my iTunes library and I couldn't be more delighted with my system.

I can't express enough how enamored I am with using this Power Mac G5. I keep looking for things to do with it or add to it just for the sake of it, it's so much fun to use.
 
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Two other things you might try @JackAHyde to move files between your Arch Linux install and your G5 (these are based in real experience; I run Arch Linux on several older PC machines I have) ...

1/ SSH FS: On Arch, use the SSH File System (sshfs) to mount your G5 as just another root volume. All that is needed is a new entry in your fstab that specifies the Mac's IP address and the use of "sshfs" as the file system. If you are interested, I can provide you with the fstab line I use.

On your Mac, just go to System Preferences, Sharing and turn on SSH access.

Now on Arch, you can simply mount the G5 just like you would any other hard drive. It is fast, clean and elegant.

2/ Good ol' FTP. Both Arch and your Mac can run an FTP server (it is built in to Leopard) and both have FTP clients, so FTP is a good way to go as well. It too is fast and seamless once you get the FTP server enabled.

On Arch, I have tended to use pureFTP as my FTP server, but there are buckets of good FTP servers available for Linux.


SAMBA is a clean choice - I am not dissing it - but it involves using a Microsoft protocol (SMB) to communicate between two non-Microsoft machines: a Mac and a Linux box. Somehow it seems cleaner to leave Microsoft out of that linkage... Yup, my biases are showing!
 
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