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Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
Currently trying out Classilla 9.3.4b. I was hesitant about upgrading for awhile, but today I decided to go for it and see what happens. I have been able to log in to Macrumors, now let's see if I can send this post.

EDIT: Success!
STAY AWAY from 9.3.4b - it does not work very well, nothing opens up with it, just 3 websites - 9.3.3 is far better and you can load about 80 percent of the web with that, except youtube and heavy java websites.. 9.3.4b is garbage and that russian site to download movies and use Quicktime to run them won't work either - nothing works with 9.3.4b - b stands for beta and of course its buggy as well. 9.3.3 is the best for classila.
 

originaldotexe

macrumors 6502
Jun 12, 2020
255
434
Kentucky
Installed xubuntu 10.04 on a 12" powerbook for kicks. I gotta say the older i go with linux distros the better the hardware support and the faster they boot and run. Anyway, having some fun with my donated machine. :)

View attachment 1804755
before long i would like to tinker with building my own distro for powerpc with kernel 2.6.x like what ubuntu 10.04 uses, that way it will be compatible with the old hardware and especially some of the finicky video cards that dont want to work on newer kernels. i think i can probably compile a lot of software to run on kernel 2.6 if i combine it with newer gcc and glibc (or maybe musl? since it's lighter & smaller which would be great for ppc) versions as well as newer versions of all the libs. best of both worlds.
 

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
2,621
5,307
Wisconsin, USA
That'd be a fun venture. I'm sure you'll have good luck. The last few days i've been slowly compiling updated versions of some software on 10.04. So far i'm trying to see what builds with the old stock libs and toolkits. If i run in to too many roadblocks i might update those though. So far bash 5.1.8 and bitlbee 3.6 built fine, and currently the latest ffmpeg is building. If i can get enough to build i thought about doing a 10 remix this winter for those older finicky devices. We'll see. So far it's just a fun experiment.
 

Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
Wicknix, please see my comments under thread "Thank you". Maybe others are not grateful for your apps, but I SURE AM and I only wish I myself can program in assembly to make good apps.
 

MacFoxG4

macrumors 6502
Nov 22, 2019
447
623
Tried the Liger theme out via ShapeShifter. It looks pretty good. It's not the same as having real 10.5, but you can see the resemblance. I tried it out because I downgraded to Tiger due to having playback issues in ffplay while running 10.5 on my Sawtooth without a CI card. 10.5 without a CI card is still useable in general on this CPU-upgraded Sawtooth, but these playback issues made me downgrade back to 10.4. These playback issues don't happen when a CI card like the geforce 6200 is installed under 10.5. Compromise is the theme with this Mac. If you want CI, you have to sacrifice 2D/3D acceleration in OS 9 and vice versa. I've heard an idea mentioned somehwere about having both a CI and non-CI card installed in your Mac and swapping the video cable back and forth depending on whether you are using OS 9 or 10.5. Might try this someday.

I attempted to dual boot Linux and OS 9 on this Mac, but that didn't work. In the process I installed a mechanical HDD I pulled from a broken PC (CMOS issues with the motherboard) which I put in the bay where the zip drive normally goes (the zip drive on my Sawtooth was broken since I got it and I ended up recycling that zip drive a long time ago; I used a broken HDD to plug up the hole in front of the case where the zip drive used to be. I recently replaced the broken HDD with the one I pulled from the PC). The HDD works, so I am keeping it in there and just have it formatted as HFS+ with nothing on it. I considered not having anything in the zip bay, but I was worried more dust would get inside. I don't have the zip bezel or the blank bezel that some Sawteeth had.
 
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wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
2,621
5,307
Wisconsin, USA
Small update to my adventures using ubuntu 10.04 on my 12" powerbook....
This week i have built more current openssl, ffmpeg, mplayer, glib, libffi, bitlbee, and the bitlbee-discord plugin. The fun is only starting for this machine. I need to see what else can be squeezed out of this 11 year old ubuntu release.

pb12-ubuntu10.04.png
 

sparty411

macrumors 6502a
Nov 13, 2018
553
501
Small update to my adventures using ubuntu 10.04 on my 12" powerbook....
This week i have built more current openssl, ffmpeg, mplayer, glib, libffi, bitlbee, and the bitlbee-discord plugin. The fun is only starting for this machine. I need to see what else can be squeezed out of this 11 year old ubuntu release.

View attachment 1808621
10.04 has amazing hardware support for these machines. This was peak PPC Linux.
 

mmphosis

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2017
219
298
I've been using the PowerPC Mac as an Alarm Clock for about a month now. It works pretty good.
There are 3 things to remember:
  • It might seem obvious, but I need to schedule the time for the PowerPC Mac to Power On. Rather than use Energy Saver, instead I am starting to use pmset from the command line to schedule to the Power On time.
  • Plug the audio jack from the speaker into the PowerPC Mac, so I can hear the alarm.
  • Make sure nothing is sitting on the Mac keyboard. :oops:
Using pmset to schedule “Power On” tomorrow at 5:55 AM
Code:
sudo pmset schedule poweron "$(date -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "`date -v+1d`" "+%m/%d/%y 05:55:00")"
 

Certificate of Excellence

macrumors 6502a
Feb 9, 2021
952
1,463
Spotted some $16.00 shipped NIB Netac 120gb SSDs on ebay, so picked a few up to play with. First up was my Quicksilver. Truthfully, I have not noticed much difference. I may repurpose this SSD in another and hook back up the two 75gb spinners I had in it as I was not unhappy with their performance. Probably should run some benchmarks as a reminder but haven't taken the time as of yet. SSD #2 is going in another 08 aluminum macbook I have that is currently brainless - thinking that would be a fun alt OS box like bsd or something along those lines or maybe a dedicated Snow Leopard install. Might be fun to put SSD #1 in my garage a1047 PMG5 that is m Q3A server/UT box.
 
I did a Geekbench showdown between an A1025 and an A1046-- a 1 GHz Titanium vs a 1 GHz Aluminium.
Suffice to say, I am incredibly surprised by the results, considering it was kept as scientific as possible.
View attachment 1813703

Oh, by the way, I got a Titanium. One more Golden Mac off the board!

By any chance, do either have any background applications running (i.e., applications under “Login Items” under User Accounts)?
 
Because it was a rainy weekend, I did a bunch more testing for the Clouded Leopard project — more or less moving over remaining Frameworks and PrivateFrameworks from 10.5.8 (which were newer than the DP Build 10A96 of Snow Leopard) and seeing which ones would crash the system. A few did, but nothing which couldn’t be fixed.

To wrap up the weekend’s toils, I ran some Geekbench benchmarks and was pleasantly surprised by the results.
 
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Doq

macrumors 6502a
Dec 8, 2019
541
806
The Lab DX
By any chance, do either have any background applications running (i.e., applications under “Login Items” under User Accounts)?
Nope. Even if this was the case, it's the exact same install run on both machines. As I positioned the Titanium as a purely OS 9 machine, it didn't have any OS X installs on it. So I booted the Companion's Tiger install on the Titanium via TDM.

(The side-by-side picture above was staged using screenshots ;))
 

Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
I did a Geekbench showdown between an A1025 and an A1046-- a 1 GHz Titanium vs a 1 GHz Aluminium.
Suffice to say, I am incredibly surprised by the results, considering it was kept as scientific as possible.
View attachment 1813703

Oh, by the way, I got a Titanium. One more Golden Mac off the board!
And because of the L3, the titanium beat the aluminum ?
 

m1maverick

macrumors 65816
Nov 22, 2020
1,368
1,267
I did a Geekbench showdown between an A1025 and an A1046-- a 1 GHz Titanium vs a 1 GHz Aluminium.
Suffice to say, I am incredibly surprised by the results, considering it was kept as scientific as possible.
The results for the A1025 are suspect as they are significantly off what EveryMac shows for this model (556). The A1046 compares similarly with the results found on EveryMac (542). Maybe dig into the individual results to see where the bottleneck lies?
 
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Doq

macrumors 6502a
Dec 8, 2019
541
806
The Lab DX
Blasted Spotlight going berserk maybe?
Ah, that might be it. I'll check that again later because that result did seem awfully suspect.



The 1Ghz Aluminum PowerBooks (at least the 15 and 17") have L3 cache. They are the only models of the Aluminum series that do.
The 15 doesn't; the first 15" Aluminium has a 7447, omitting L3 cache but bumping L2 cache to 512k. The 17 did because the first 17" had a 7455, like the Titanium. The first generation Aluminium G4s didn't have a 15" as Apple was still selling the last Titanium, but the second generation did.

The results for the A1025 are suspect as they are significantly off what EveryMac shows for this model (556). The A1046 compares similarly with the results found on EveryMac (542). Maybe dig into the individual results to see where the bottleneck lies?
It was probably Spotlight, as Amethyst mentioned above. More on this later.
 
It's equivalent.

The 1Ghz Aluminum PowerBooks (at least the 15 and 17") have L3 cache. They are the only models of the Aluminum series that do.

I know. I have a 17" AlBook with L3 cache. :)

The difference has to be the G4 chip I think.

Aside from CPU, the only other hardware differences to come to mind, and most pertinent to the first, second, and third parts of the Geekbench test, would be, respectively, the speed of the GPU and the speed of the memory in the aluminium 1GHz.

For the latter, the memory speed boost in the aluminium 1GHz would offset whatever boost having an L3 cache plays in the titanium 1GHz: the jump from 144-pin PC133 (133Mhz) to 200-pin PC-2700 at 333MHz was a substantial speed bump on the memory bus, partly making up for what the CPU itself lost in the aluminium iteration.

As for the GPU, the clock speeds of the Radeon Mobility 9000s ranged between 250 and 275MHz (depending on the revision, I think 250MHz for Radeon Mobility), while the Mobility Radeon 9600s, as memory serves, ranged between 325MHz and 500MHz (depending on the revision, I think 325MHz for the Radeon Mobility).

Even Everymac finds the Geekbench scores they posted being fairly comparable — [1] [2] — despite one being a “pear-lemon” combo and the other being, well, an “apple-lime” combo, to borrow from produce. :)

One way I could envision the GB scores here being so different might be from using the same install drive in both machines, as opposed to using installations specific to each machine using the same Tiger DVD install (i.e., allowing system installation to configure for specific hardware), but offhand I’m not sure how the installation itself might vary.
 

Certificate of Excellence

macrumors 6502a
Feb 9, 2021
952
1,463
Spotted some $16.00 shipped NIB Netac 120gb SSDs on ebay, so picked a few up to play with. First up was my Quicksilver. Truthfully, I have not noticed much difference. I may repurpose this SSD in another and hook back up the two 75gb spinners I had in it as I was not unhappy with their performance. Probably should run some benchmarks as a reminder but haven't taken the time as of yet. SSD #2 is going in another 08 aluminum macbook I have that is currently brainless - thinking that would be a fun alt OS box like bsd or something along those lines or maybe a dedicated Snow Leopard install. Might be fun to put SSD #1 in my garage a1047 PMG5 that is m Q3A server/UT box.
OK, carved out some time over the past few days to get some spinner vs SDD Xbench scores.

QS WD Spinner XBench.jpg
QSPMG4 120GB Netac SSD XBench.jpg


The score differential is impressive - as expected the SSD beats sequential and crushes the spinner at random writes, however in real world application (boot up, apps opening up etc.), I did not notice much difference at all. TFFx opened a few seconds faster maybe but nothing too exceptional.For now, I have the spinners back in there. Might be fun to do the 75gb spinners in there in software raid0. Right now, drive two has tiger and drive one has leopard. I rarely boot into Tiger on this box so would have no issue sacrificing it to do raid0. For giggles, I fired up Geekbench to see if the SSD had any effect and there was nominal improvement.

*Just realized the saved results require GB to open which I do not have on this macbook (saved from my QS to my NAS), so will need to add those later when Im down stairs.

Spinner GB .jpg
Netac SSD GB.jpg
 
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Doq

macrumors 6502a
Dec 8, 2019
541
806
The Lab DX
After checking to make sure Spotlight isn't doing anything undesireable, I reran GB, twice, and got a pair of 350s. While above the 303 in the picture, it's still far less than what it *should* be.

When I pulled up Apple System Profiler in OS 9, the CPU speed read '667 MHz/1000 MHz', which is telling me that the Titanium can run at both speeds. I wonder if it's downclocking itself for some reason. 🤔

e~ I also took a quick detour to EveryMac and found that a 350 is comparable to a 667 MHz Titanium. Coincidence?

e2~ I'm going to spin this off into its own thread. More on this later.
 
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