What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[theMarble]

Just over a week ago, I picked up a 2006 revision 20" ACD. To go alongside it, I've installed a fresh copy of Tiger on my 17" MBP. I also put my 20" iMac G4 next to it. Not an Intel machine, but looks great next to it.

I've decided to make this a 2006/2007 only machine, making it a time capsule into what the Mac looked like during the early stages of the Intel transition. Other than TenFourFox Intel (of which I may end up compiling InterWeb for 10.4 Intel, either using the G5 or 10.6 codebase, if possible?), it's only running software that was out at the time, such as iLife/iWork '06, CS3 and FCS2.

I also have my 2007 Mac mini sitting underneath the ACD to raise it up to my eye level, and have my 13" MBP underneath the 17". So that makes 4 Macs on this desk (excluding my rMBP).

 

[B S Magnet]

I added High Sierra to my A1261 (this one is urbanologia, if you’re keeping up) using dosdude1’s patcher, because why not…

As a secondary OS on my early 2008 17-inch MacBook Pro (it’ll continue to be, principally, a 10.6.8 box), it handles pretty well, even with 6GB max RAM and a SATA-I bus for the SSD. Those rare moments when you’re pushing the system (like, simultaneously, having over 100 Firefox tabs open, installing something, letting mdworker finish indexing, etc.) aren’t really hangs, more like the ever-slightest of a hesitation before doing it without complaint.

Planned obsolescence my indigo denim jeans, pffff…

EDIT update: Signal runs just fine on 15-year-old hardware. Firefox runs just fine on 15-year-old hardware. Macports runs just fine on 15-year-old hardware. The current version of gqrx runs just fine on 15-year-old hardware. Rendering 8K video in DaVinci Resolve… look, c’mon. Maybe with a contemporary eGPU connected via the 1x lane ExpressCard port (hey, you never know…)

 

[DCBassman]

Having proved I can run Linux Mint on both my Macs, they are mow both running High Sierra. The iMac: I may try and push this to Mojave, Catalina does work on it, but not well enough without a graphics upgrade.

 

[chaosbunny]

View attachment 2216404
Just over a week ago, I picked up a 2006 revision 20" ACD. To go alongside it, I've installed a fresh copy of Tiger on my 17" MBP. I also put my 20" iMac G4 next to it. Not an Intel machine, but looks great next to it.

I've decided to make this a 2006/2007 only machine, making it a time capsule into what the Mac looked like during the early stages of the Intel transition. Other than TenFourFox Intel (of which I may end up compiling InterWeb for 10.4 Intel, either using the G5 or 10.6 codebase, if possible?), it's only running software that was out at the time, such as iLife/iWork '06, CS3 and FCS2.

I also have my 2007 Mac mini sitting underneath the ACD to raise it up to my eye level, and have my 13" MBP underneath the 17". So that makes 4 Macs on this desk (excluding my rMBP).

That's a fantastic collection. Looking great with the light and the plant. I hope you don't mind the comment, but that 17" mbp deserves a better stand.

 

[chaosbunny]

I put a new battery in mine years ago, but it only lasted about a year before calling it quits (and then swelled and nearly cracked the trackpad), and at that point I wasn't much interested in buying yet another. Did you grab one on eBay or from someplace like OWC?

Ouch, that's bad news. I bought one from Amazon that had positive reviews. I put it in yesterday and it's currently calibrating. It seems these asian rebuilds of the original parts have quite a gap in terms of quality. I think I'll keep the original 50% one just in case. I hope mine behaves better.

 

[theMarble]

That's a fantastic collection. Looking great with the light and the plant.

Thanks! I've been super lucky all things considered in terms of finding these machines. The iMac is definitely the best machine in my collection, as it represents the fastest G4 iMac you could ever get (other than replacing the CPU with a 7448). It is a mint condition 20" model with the 1.25GHz G4, 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. I've removed the optical drive to lower the weight, applied new thermal paste, dusted everything and installed an AirPort Extreme card. The only thing it doesn't have is Bluetooth, but I've got a Teleport server running on the Mac mini to connect my Apple Wireless Keyboard/Mouse.

I've got other machines elsewhere too, some of which I've mentioned on this forum.

Since that photo was taken, I've moved the plant to sit behind the ACD, with its leaves hanging out in front of it, which I think looks a bit nicer. Maybe it's time for a full setup photo!

I hope you don't mind the comment, but that 17" mbp deserves a better stand.

No problem at all! I want to get myself an era-appropriate stand (such as the Griffin iCurve or Elevator...) but finding a mint condition one used is pretty difficult these days. The Elevator is still sold new, so I may end up buying one if I can't find one used. A VESA-arm laptop stand is another option that I've been looking at, as that takes up even less room on a desk, plus the ability to move it freely.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I am a fan of the aluminum Rain Design M stand. It looks great with either my Intel macbookpro or my PPC Powerbooks.

 

[Alexis Trinquet]

Well, guess what came down my way? A 2011 27in iMac, it isn't mine to keep but rather it's for a client that I'm fixing it up (and hitting brick wall after brick wall in the process).

The symptoms? It doesn't boot at all, and the disk is making worrysome "spinning rust thrashing" noises, so now I'm fighting the darn thing trying to clone it on a SSD. Or in theory, that's what I'm trying to achieve.

The reality? It doesn't even want to boot, it loads up to the "loading bar " thingamabob then it just falls flat, belly up and shuts down.

[snip]

Update: It was indeed the hard drive, guess it was somehow messing the bus up, when I popped the HDD out (and getting a zap from the PSU and a cut on my finger in the process, yeah, this Mac hates me for some reason) and swapped in the SSD, it booted up.

I'm never opening that thing up, especially since the LVDS cable connector gave me a bit of a scare (the part with the pins that slides into the motherboard got bent slightly), I managed to reconnect it somehow.

At least it's not glued shut like the 21in I had to do a HDD swap on... I'll give it that.

 

[eyoungren]

What have you done with an early Intel recently?

Shut them down.

It's that time of year again and our unseasonal mild weather ends tomorrow. 105º tomorrow and that'll be our average until August when it goes to 110º.

Four Minis and one MBP in the garage plus an external drive, don't need them running in that heat. The garage does not see direct light, but it does heat up.

Magic keyboard and Magic trackpad now inside the house. Don't need batteries swelling/exploding.

End of September and I can reboot all that stuff again.

 

[DCBassman]

Shuffled some RAM sticks around between machines, which gave my wife's Dell its full complement of 8GB, and gave me 6GB to put in the late-2009 iMac, bringing it up to a reasonable 10GB. The new sticks are 1333MHz but the machine doesn't mind!

 

[VivienM]

I just booted my new-to-me mid-2010 Mac Pro with a Windows XP disc. Was curious to know if it would work... I expected it to, and it does. I don't think there's any point to actually installing XP on it, though.

(The installer even sees the SSD just fine, but it may help that I had slipstreamed the Intel ICH10 drivers in there for another project.)

I assume, if this thing will boot a Windows XP disc, that I could get it to boot MS-DOS 6.22 somehow and have a big existential moment about the state of the Mac in the Intel era?

 

[eyoungren]

Ugh…

So, for my MacPro I have a large Photoshop template that shows where my primary five displays lay out for one background that covers all displays seamlessly. I've got masks applied so the transparent areas are where the background would not be.

Basically, the background (the blue forest) covers all five displays.

That leaves that 20" Cinema Display I have on the far right by itself. I finally decided to connect it today (in this panoramic template). Since the 20" can shift left or right, I added the display's dimensions to both the right and the left. Additionally, since the two vertical Cinema Displays I have are actually a bit lower than the main displays AND the 20" Cinema Display, I had to add about 100 pixels to the dimensions and move both everything but those two vertical displays up 100 pixels.

This is going to mean that the burst on the right actually falls on to the 20" Cinema Display versus me faking it in a second PSD file. Since I currently have no Cinema Display on the left, the part on the far left side will remain empty.

A lot of moving guides, fixed selections and math.

 

[DCBassman]

Tried to fit an Airport Extreme card to my Mac Pro 3,1. Dropped a screw...
Much dismantling (and cleaning!) later, I found it was an incompatible model. Rats.
Only took four hours.

 

[eyoungren]

Yeah, more Photoshop. MacPro 4,1.

 

[eyoungren]

Decided to put that SIIG dual display adapter I have to use today. Installed the DisplayLink driver from SIIG's site and voila.

<clears throat>

Seven displays.



I wanted to use my ACD 20" Cinema, but I just could not safely place it on the left side. But the 20" Acer display I had lying around in the garage is the exact same screen size/resolution and it has a smaller physical footprint.

I have one more port. It's HDMI and I have the HDMI to DVI adapter. What I do NOT have is any more desk space!

I'll live…I think!

Next, another desktop background to design!!!!!

EDIT: The knicknacks on the left weren't working for me. Fine when no display was there, but blocking at least a third of the display. I've since rearranged things and it's more open now.

 

[B S Magnet]

Decided to put that SIIG dual display adapter I have to use today. Installed the DisplayLink driver from SIIG's site and voila.

<clears throat>

Seven displays.

View attachment 2222161

I wanted to use my ACD 20" Cinema, but I just could not safely place it on the left side. But the 20" Acer display I had lying around in the garage is the exact same screen size/resolution and it has a smaller physical footprint.

I have one more port. It's HDMI and I have the HDMI to DVI adapter. What I do NOT have is any more desk space!

I'll live…I think!

Next, another desktop background to design!!!!!

EDIT: The knicknacks on the left weren't working for me. Fine when no display was there, but blocking at least a third of the display. I've since rearranged things and it's more open now.

Actual graph of the local power grid (black) and the back-up support spike from elsewhere in the country (orange) each morning when @eyoungren wakes his monitors from sleep.

Morning grid supervisor, walking into the control room and biting into a bagel: “Erik again?”
Overnight grid supervisor, sipping last coffee of the night: “Erik again.”

 

[GMShadow]

Pretty easy fix though.

 

[B S Magnet]

Pretty easy fix though.

Yah.

 

[DCBassman]

Took both the Mac Pro 3,1 and the 2009 iMac back to Linux Mint.
The iMac is simply plug in the USB and boot. The Mac Pro was previously a complete nightmare. Not this time. Same stick as the iMac, straight into GRUB, hit enter. Nothing. Ignore it while I do something else. Turn back, there's the live system up and running. Install it, no issues. Once installed, used the Driver manager to see if the recently installed Airport Extreme card, invisible to High Sierra, was there. It offered a driver, I said yes please, and the machine is now fully independent of dongles, etc.
The other thing about Mint on the Pro is that it doesn't give a hoot what video card is in it, it just works, and in this scenario the boot screen isn't needed. However, there's always and ElCap drive in the cupboard, just in case...

 

[theMarble]

Today I used my 2009 MBP to get screenshots of 17 (currently, there are still more to do) different system-wide themes for Snow Leopard.

My plan is to gather all of these together into a "A comprehensive guide to..." style WikiPost on themes for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, as themes for these OS's have become extraordinarily hard to find. Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to dig up over 20 themes for Leopard and Snow Leopard (including multiple for PPC 10.5).

Unfortunately, most of them are either 10.5 or 10.6, as despite the two looking near identical on the surface, under the hood they have turned out to be very different. The plan is also to have some BowTie and GeekTool scripts in there too, along with some of the more popular icon packs from when the theming community was alive. I've also got a couple other system mods (including my remake of HUD-style dialogs) too.

 

[eyoungren]

Today I used my 2009 MBP to get screenshots of 17 (currently, there are still more to do) different system-wide themes for Snow Leopard.

View attachment 2222367

My plan is to gather all of these together into a "A comprehensive guide to..." style WikiPost on themes for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, as themes for these OS's have become extraordinarily hard to find. Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to dig up over 20 themes for Leopard and Snow Leopard (including multiple for PPC 10.5).

Unfortunately, most of them are either 10.5 or 10.6, as despite the two looking near identical on the surface, under the hood they have turned out to be very different. The plan is also to have some BowTie and GeekTool scripts in there too, along with some of the more popular icon packs from when the theming community was alive. I've also got a couple other system mods (including my remake of HUD-style dialogs) too.

I have the Black Mac OSX theme. It's a combination of a Magnifique theme and a Candybar dock/icon theme. It works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Several years back it was posted on a website one of the users in the PowerPC forum was maintaining (the same person doing the PowerPC App store I think). No idea if that site is still up or not. But I have the theme in Dropbox as there is a thread on that subforum that links to it.

I have some Geektool scripts as well. There was a time I was downloading right and left to try and find stuff that worked for me. Some of the scripts I had to modify to get the way I wanted, or just what I wanted in general. Mainly time and weather stuff.

You're welcome to anything I have - although it may take some digging to find.

 

[B S Magnet]

Today I used my 2009 MBP to get screenshots of 17 (currently, there are still more to do) different system-wide themes for Snow Leopard.

View attachment 2222367

My plan is to gather all of these together into a "A comprehensive guide to..." style WikiPost on themes for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, as themes for these OS's have become extraordinarily hard to find. Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to dig up over 20 themes for Leopard and Snow Leopard (including multiple for PPC 10.5).

Unfortunately, most of them are either 10.5 or 10.6, as despite the two looking near identical on the surface, under the hood they have turned out to be very different. The plan is also to have some BowTie and GeekTool scripts in there too, along with some of the more popular icon packs from when the theming community was alive. I've also got a couple other system mods (including my remake of HUD-style dialogs) too.

I’ll be the first here to encourage you to bundle up each theme into easy-to-apply zip archives, a zip archive with sub-directories for each theme (or something along those lines), in addition to your assembling a wikipost on how to set up, apply, and mix-n-match those themes.

I really love what you showed earlier this week with that dark look and feel with SL, and it might be fun to tinker with that on one of my 10.6.8 boxes.

 

[theMarble]

I have the Black Mac OSX theme. It's a combination of a Magnifique theme and a Candybar dock/icon theme. It works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Several years back it was posted on a website one of the users in the PowerPC forum was maintaining (the same person doing the PowerPC App store I think). No idea if that site is still up or not. But I have the theme in Dropbox as there is a thread on that subforum that links to it.

Funnily enough, your download was the first one I got! I recall you also uploaded it + a copy of Magnifique a long time ago now. That's where I got it from.

This means that I will have two "Black" themes for 10.5/10.6. I've got a SL-only (to my knowledge, need to test on 10.5) Black OS X theme as well, however that one also changes the traffic light buttons to be black as well.

I actually forgot about the modern PPC macOS themes (made by the PPCAppStore person as well), so thanks for reminding me!

I’ll be the first here to encourage you to bundle up each theme into easy-to-apply zip archives, a zip archive with sub-directories for each theme (or something along those lines), in addition to your assembling a wikipost on how to set up, apply, and mix-n-match those themes.

Quite a few of the themes came packaged as ThemePark and Magnifique plugins, while others had DMG installers (so just like installing an app), and others need manual installation.

However, at the end of the day they are all fancy packages for the three files that allow you to theme Mac OS X; SArtFile.bin, ArtFile.bin and Extras2.rsrc. For the themes that came in ThemePark and/or Magnifique packages, I plan to include separate downloads for their app packages, and the plain theme files.

It is in theory possible to write a simple script/app to backup the default files, install the plain theme files into their correct location, and finally send a log off command to the system.

In terms of mixing and matching themes, once again in theory that can be done, however that requires manually editing those three files, and hoping that it won't screw up the OS.

 

[eyoungren]

Funnily enough, your download was the first one I got! I recall you also uploaded it + a copy of Magnifique a long time ago now. That's where I got it from.

This means that I will have two "Black" themes for 10.5/10.6. I've got a SL-only (to my knowledge, need to test on 10.5) Black OS X theme as well, however that one also changes the traffic light buttons to be black as well.

I actually forgot about the modern PPC macOS themes (made by the PPCAppStore person as well), so thanks for reminding me!


Quite a few of the themes came packaged as ThemePark and Magnifique plugins, while others had DMG installers (so just like installing an app), and others need manual installation.

However, at the end of the day they are all fancy packages for the three files that allow you to them Mac OS X; SArtFile.bin, ArtFile.bin and Extras2.rsrc. For the themes that came in ThemePark and/or Magnifique packages, I plan to include seperate downloads for their app packages, and the plain theme files.

It is in theory possible to write a simple script/app to backup the default files, install the plain theme files into their correct location, and finally send a log off command to the system.

In terms of mixing and matching themes, once again in theory that can be done, however that requires manually editing those three files, and hoping that it won't screw up the OS.

For the record, Magnifique works on Snow Leopard. You probably know that, I'm just stating it for anyone else. The app will throw up an Applescript error, but it functions correctly nonetheless.

 

[theMarble]

For the record, Magnifique works on Snow Leopard. You probably know that, I'm just stating it for anyone else. The app will throw up an Applescript error, but it functions correctly nonetheless.

Black Mac OS X for Magnifique does work on Snow Leopard, however not all themes do. During the testing that I was doing yesterday, I found a couple 10.5 Magnfique themes that when applied will make you think the OS had a seizure. That's why backing up the default files is very important.