What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[eyoungren]

So my wife comes downstairs today and tells me an axiom I already know, "Make ONE change…!" Meaning, that whatever the one change is that you make, it creates a domino effect elsewhere. Last week, a fish tank pump decided to die and pump all the water out of the tank on to the bedroom floor. Of course a power strip was right under the tank stand so the breaker for the master bedroom tripped when the power strip bought the farm. She's been dealing with rearranging things all week (the one goldfish she has survived).

I should have listened…but nah…

I shut off Quicksilver, which is what I've used as an app launcher for years now. It never seems to find some of the folders and files I am looking for. Since I use Spotlight on the work Mac for this, I had to reactivate it.

And that's when things went south. ONE CHANGE!

Had to force restart the MacPro.

Several reboots later and I've decided that the primary six displays I have connected are enough. I hate reboots because I'm never quite sure whether the two DisplayLink displays will give me problems or not. And today they gave me problems - which aren't resolving according to the tricks I've learned. So, I nuked them. Disconnected the device and uninstalled DisplayLink.

Back to six displays.

Yeah, so one change…

In dealing with the DisplayLink issues in the past, one of the tricks was resetting PRAM. Unfortunately, I forget that resetting PRAM re-enables SIP. So after using Onyx to activate Spotlight today I got beachballs and really slow performance.

Enough of that, disable Spotlight and re-enable Quicksilver - I'll deal with the folder it can't find. Only, SIP is enabled. So, had to disable that again to get Spotlight disabled. Sigh.

Oh well. I found out how to add a source to Quicksilver so we'll see if that helps.

 

[TheShortTimer]

This evening, I took part in a web conference using Jitsi and my 11" 2010 C2D MBA running Catalina w/ Firefox.

On the same machine I used GIMP to blur the identities of the participants and the URL in the above screenshot.

 

[Raging Dufus]

It's got a quad-core i5, so not really an "early Intel" Mac according to my own definition and the stated purpose of this forum, but my mid-2011 iMac 12,1 is 13 years old now and a common topic of conversation here. May I suggest we redefine the forum to include so-called "obsolete" Intel Macs? Or, just keep rolling as-is, seems to work...

Anyway, here's what I did: installed OCLP and I'm now rocking Monterey!



OK, I'm probably more excited about it than you are. Been putting this off more than a year, thinking I'd need to upgrade the non-Metal GPU, waiting for enough free time and free space to coincide so I could actually do it. But web-security circumstances forced my hand, Chrome's long out of support for High Sierra and Firefox soon to follow. I do love using alternative browsers, but some sites just require the big boys to properly function; and the thought of doing, say, banking; on an out-of-support OS; with an out-of-support browser; is just a bridge too far for me.

I can't believe how well Monterey works on this thing. I upgraded to more RAM and an SSD a few years ago, so it wasn't coming in with the stock configuration, but - when you're warned there'll be no graphics acceleration on a Mac, I've always taken that to mean "virtually unusable." But then I see several people commenting about how Monterey and later function just fine on their non-GPU-upgraded 2011 iMacs, so figured I'd give it a try. It isn't perfect, there's some quirks like having to re-identify my non-Apple keyboard every time after wake or reboot; and having to reconnect to wifi each time under the same circumstances; but these are tolerable things and acceptable trade-offs for security. AFAICS, apart from the above minor annoyances, everything else I need the computer to do works just fine. I know apps like Maps won't work, and Siri's kinda buggy, but I don't use those anyway, so I'm indifferent.

Finally, I have to say: major kudos to the OCLP team. The only thing they could have done to make this upgrade easier is to come to my house and do it for me. Thanks!

 

[DCBassman]

It's got a quad-core i5, so not really an "early Intel" Mac according to my own definition and the stated purpose of this forum, but my mid-2011 iMac 12,1 is 13 years old now and a common topic of conversation here. May I suggest we redefine the forum to include so-called "obsolete" Intel Macs? Or, just keep rolling as-is, seems to work...

Anyway, here's what I did: installed OCLP and I'm now rocking Monterey!

View attachment 2389172

OK, I'm probably more excited about it than you are. Been putting this off more than a year, thinking I'd need to upgrade the non-Metal GPU, waiting for enough free time and free space to coincide so I could actually do it. But web-security circumstances forced my hand, Chrome's long out of support for High Sierra and Firefox soon to follow. I do love using alternative browsers, but some sites just require the big boys to properly function; and the thought of doing, say, banking; on an out-of-support OS; with an out-of-support browser; is just a bridge too far for me.

I can't believe how well Monterey works on this thing. I upgraded to more RAM and an SSD a few years ago, so it wasn't coming in with the stock configuration, but - when you're warned there'll be no graphics acceleration on a Mac, I've always taken that to mean "virtually unusable." But then I see several people commenting about how Monterey and later function just fine on their non-GPU-upgraded 2011 iMacs, so figured I'd give it a try. It isn't perfect, there's some quirks like having to re-identify my non-Apple keyboard every time after wake or reboot; and having to reconnect to wifi each time under the same circumstances; but these are tolerable things and acceptable trade-offs for security. AFAICS, apart from the above minor annoyances, everything else I need the computer to do works just fine. I know apps like Maps won't work, and Siri's kinda buggy, but I don't use those anyway, so I'm indifferent.

Finally, I have to say: major kudos to the OCLP team. The only thing they could have done to make this upgrade easier is to come to my house and do it for me. Thanks!

I upgraded my 12,1 all the way, except for the GPU. i7-2600S, 32GB RAM, 750GB SSD. It runs Sonoma pretty well under OCLP. And you DO have accelerated graphics; OCLP sees to that too, with caveats like Maps as mentioned.
The iMac is not in use right now as I'm considering selling it. But I cannot quite do it yet!

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Chrome's long out of support for High Sierra and Firefox soon to follow

Have a look at Ungoogled Chromium & Librewolf. Requires manual installation & update.

 

[rampancy]

Have a look at Ungoogled Chromium & Librewolf. Requires manual installation & update.

I believe Librewolf needs 10.15 minimum, as it's currently based off of FF 126, and Ungoogled Chrohmium also needs at least 10.15 too.

Chromium Legacy and FF ESR still work on High Sierra and are "close enough" to mainline, official versions.

 

[DCBassman]

Inspired by your post, @Raging Dufus , got the 12,1 out and it's currently installing Sonoma. Added the Elgato Thunderbolt 2 dock and some extra USB3 ports via that, and should be good to go later today.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Chromium Legacy and FF ESR still work on High Sierra and are "close enough" to mainline, official versions.

I call this "TTL Exceeded" .

 

[DCBassman]

So, here I am, back on the iMac 12,1. OCLP'd it up to Sonoma, added the Elgato dock for USB 3, and reactivated the A1355 Time Capsule as backup. Have retired, temporarily, the big Windows bopx, and replaced it with one of the Asus S200E sub-notebooks to which I've connected external drives as necessary.

A quick not entirely unrelated question on the subject of Metal capability: I patched the Mac Mini 3,1 up to Catalina, which needs Metal, yes? The machine doesn't have it, yet Maps worked fine. How is it that that worked? It irks me a bit that Catalina Patcher seems able to do this, yet OCLP cannot. Or maybe I have the wrong end of a many-branched stick?😐

 

[Grumpus]

A quick not entirely unrelated question on the subject of Metal capability: I patched the Mac Mini 3,1 up to Catalina, which needs Metal, yes? The machine doesn't have it, yet Maps worked fine. How is it that that worked?

A possible explanation is that the Catalina Maps app doesn't do any graphics calls which require Metal.

 

[Raging Dufus]

Chromium Legacy and FF ESR still work on High Sierra and are "close enough" to mainline, official versions.

I used both on my iMac prior to OCLP'ing to Monterey, and still use CL on other machines. But the iMac is mission-critical for handling my household finances via the web, and FF ESR goes out of support on High Sierra this coming September I believe. CL was always buggy in High Sierra on that machine, and the recent incident with GitHub where the CL repository just vanished for a few days also gave me pause; I'm glad that was resolved but I just can't mess around with fringe projects when it comes to my finances.

 

[eyoungren]

I sucked it up and installed Monterey on my MacPro via OCLP.



This meant walking through the steps on the website and following directions. First hurdle…SSD was not APFS. Got that sorted and converted, boot drive is now APFS.

Second hurdle was making myself be very patient while the installer went through a number of reboots, many of which looked like nothing was happening or the system was stalled.

Third hurdle was resetting my vertical displays. Somehow the rotation angles did not survive the update. That's all fixed and my wallpaper and display arrangement is back to normal.

I would have tried Sonoma, but the patcher was warning that my keyboard and mouse might not be recognized. Maybe someone has some insight on that. In any case, here I am on Monterey.

Going to be going through and fixing apps now. But at least I have averted a growing obsolescence.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Second hurdle was making myself be very patient while the installer went through a number of reboots, many of which looked like nothing was happening or the system was stalled.

This is why I always enable Verbose mode in NVRAM (with Onyx, for example). At least I can see something is going . About Sonoma - AVX2 is main roadblock.

 

[eyoungren]

AVX2 is main roadblock.

My primary desktop Mac has always used a wired keyboard and a wired mouse. For the last 7 or 8 years that has been a M7803 keyboard and a wired Mighty Mouse. Generally these are plugged directly in to the Mac's USB port - although a few months back I finally plugged it in to my KVM switch.

So, this AVX2 thing prevents wired keyboards and wired mice from working under Ventura and Sonoma?

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

No, this is caused by removed USB1 support in Ventura & later OSes. (My keyboard is plugged in LED Cinema's 27" port). AVX2 is Intel processor extensions required for work of AMD video drivers and expanding list of software.

 

[eyoungren]

No, this is caused by removed USB1 support in Ventura & later OSes. (My keyboard is plugged in LED Cinema's 27" port). AVX2 is Intel processor extensions required for work of AMD video drivers and expanding list of software.

OK, thanks! That makes sense. I think for now, I'll be comfortable staying here for some time. One of my primary motivations for going to Monterey (at least today) was outdated browsers.

 

[swamprock]

I would have tried Sonoma, but the patcher was warning that my keyboard and mouse might not be recognized. Maybe someone has some insight on that. In any case, here I am on Monterey.

If you plug in a USB hub, and then plug in a keyboard and mouse into that, you won't have this issue when installing Sonoma.

 

[eyoungren]

If you plug in a USB hub, and then plug in a keyboard and mouse into that, you won't have this issue when installing Sonoma.

Thanks, I might look in to that. I assume it needs to be a USB 2.0 hub though?

 

[rin67630]

No, this is caused by removed USB1 support in Ventura & later OSes. (My keyboard is plugged in LED Cinema's 27" port). AVX2 is Intel processor extensions required for work of AMD video drivers and expanding list of software.

Doesn't OCLP retrofit USB1 support?

 

[headlessmike]

Doesn't OCLP retrofit USB1 support?

It does once root patches are installed. Until then a hub is needed.

 

[headlessmike]

Thanks, I might look in to that. I assume it needs to be a USB 2.0 hub though?

A USB 3.0 hub will work just as well. That's what I use.

 

[swamprock]

Thanks, I might look in to that. I assume it needs to be a USB 2.0 hub though?

Yeah 2.0 and up.

 

[DouglasCarroll]

I brought home a Mac Pro 5,1 that I picked up for free and installed High Sierra on the internal SSD. Came with a Radeon 5870 and 16 gigs of Ram. I went ahead and ordered a couple of 3.6GHz 6 core dual XEONS for it to update the computer and am planning on transferring everything from my Mac Pro 3,1 into the 5,1 for a more robust system. Will probably upgrade it to Mojave, but also might just leave it on High Sierra for what I use it for (mostly copying Blu-Rays and then transcoding them to .mp4 files).

I also rescued a free 2010 15" MacBook Pro that had a swollen battery and was a mess and removed the battery (and properly recycled it) and then installed an SSD and 8 Gigs of RAM I had laying around and then installed High Sierra. I'm still not 100% certain what I might use it for but I hate to see a system that still works go to waste plus it's got a built in DVD drive so that has to be useful for something. Possibly I'll experiment putting Linux on it, don't know.

Love that free stuff though!!

 

[eyoungren]

My banking app on my iPhone was wonky this morning, so thought I'd login to the website. All I got was a blank page. So, given that I have uMatrix on Vivaldi, I tried again in Edge. Blank page.

So, now I'm thinking, perhaps the user agent. I'd noticed that it wasn't reporting correctly before, but why would any user agent changes in one browser affect three (Vivaldi, Edge, Safari)?

Developer menu to change the UA in Safari works and it does do that. But, the default is 'wrong'.

Or, I think it's wrong. Turns out that even the M2 Mac I use for work running Sonoma reports the SAME user agent.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

More Googling seems to indicate that this is for compatibility purposes. Just weird.

So, if this is what reports, then the issue has to be with my bank's systems and not my side.

 

[eyoungren]

Used the Snow Leopard Mac Mini and Photoshop CS2 to scan in the cover artwork of a book (Mistress of the Empire by Feist and Wurts). Cut out Mara of the Acoma and dropped her in to my desktop wallpaper. I'd already dropped in Alita Battle Angel (from the movie, not the manga) earlier. Edited the bit for the 23" Cinema Display. Processed new desktop wallpaper.

Since I'm back to six displays, I needed to move things back. Four displays modified in all this. I will spare you the center display as that was basically moving Karan S'Jet up a bit.