- This was my first Hackintosh in a vintage Apple housing. The I/O shield comes from an old Digitalis HTPC housing. Mainboard: Gigabyte Z86MX-UD2H-B3 Details.
- In response, developer Cameron Kaiser created a test build of Firefox 4 that could run on his Power Mac G5 at the same time as support was being withdrawn from beta 7. This was released to users in separate builds for AltiVec Macs and G3 Macs on November 8, 2010.
Based on Mozilla Firefox ESR 45; Supports most Firefox add-ons and extensions; Current with Firefox security and encryption; Enhanced for G4 and G5 with AltiVec-accelerated image, video and HTML processing; PowerPC JavaScript just-in-time compilation; Compatible with all G3, G4 and G5 Power Macs with 10.4 or 10.5.
It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. I learned some lessons. I’m going to make it a lot easier for you to install Linux on your old PPC Macs.
I’ve experimented with Linux and BSD Macs going back to the Mac IIci era, and I’ve never had much luck. Back in the olden days, Linux was a text-based operating system similar to MS-DOS. Everything was handled through the command line in the late 1990s. This time around I wanted to create a “live” flash drive so I could make sure it actually worked before committing to installing Linux on a hard drive.
If only I’d had a blank CD-R or DVD-R, it would have been a lot easier!
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin.
Pick a Distro
Step one is to choose your distribution. After talking with others in our small-but-growing Linux PPC Facebook group, I settled on Lubuntu as a good starting point. Lubuntu is known for having a lighter-weight user interface, LXDE – similar to what Simon Royal used when he put LXLE on an old PC.
Ubuntu Linux has a simple numbering scheme for its versions. Version 14.04 was released in the 4th month of 2014, and 16.04 in the 4th month of 2016. That’s also the latest version available for PowerPC at present. You can download 14.04 and 16.04 from this page, earlier versions from this page, where you can also get version 12.04 for PowerPC, among many other architectures.
PowerPC distros prior to version 12.04 have separate 32-bit and 64-bit installers. The only PowerPC Macs that can use a 64-bit operating system are G5 iMacs and Power Macs. Anything before G5 can only use a 32-bit Linux. Starting with version 12.04 the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are part of the same package for Macs.
I suggest you start by downloading Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) desktop CD, which is designed to be burnt to a CD-R and give you a fully bootable way to test out Linux before you commit to it. That’s fine if you have blank CD-R media or a CD-RW disc, but I haven’t burnt a CD in years and have no blanks at present.
That was also the biggest reason I had problems. Using a USB Flash Drive was an exercise in frustration.
The USB Flash Drive Problem
I do, however, have a few 8 GB and larger USB flash drives, and there are plenty of instructions online for properly formatting the flash drive and getting the bootable ISO installed. And none of them worked on my Power Mac G5. I would spend hours trying this, that, and the other thing. Formatting the flash drive was the easy part; installing the ISO and creating a bootable system stumped me.
Nfs most wanted for mac torrent. The only method I found that worked for creating a bootable USB flash drive with Lubuntu on it required me to use Etcher, a freeware app that takes an ISO and creates a bootable flash drive from it. However, Etcher doesn’t run on PowerPC Macs. Nor does it run on my Intel Macs with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I had to use one of my Macs with OS X 10.11 El Capitan installed, and that did the job.
In other words, you need a fairly modern Mac to create the bootable flash drive you need to launch Linux on PowerPC Macs.
I formatted the flash drive as FAT, exFAT, HFS+, Apple Partition Map, GUID Partition Map, and Master Boot Record. Etcher dutifully imaged the ISO file to the flash drive. But it wouldn’t boot.
The key is to format the flash drive using Master Boot Record and FAT. Those are not the default settings, so you’ll have to find them in your version of Disk Utility.
But It Won’t Boot
I’ve been a spoiled Mac user since 1986, and if I’d had a CD-R or DVD-R, this would have been easy. Start your Mac, hold down the C key, and it will boot from whatever is in your optical drive. That goes back to the first Macs with built-in CD-ROM drives. It’s easy, but there’s nothing nearly as easy for booting from a USB flash drive.
On most Macs, if you hold down the Option key (marked Opt on some Mac keyboards, Alt on Windows keyboard) at startup, your Mac will present you with all the bootable options on your computer. On my Power Mac G5, the options are OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, 10.4.11 Tiger Server, and 10.5.8 Leopard.
If I’d had an external USB or FireWire drive, it would have shown up as well. But no matter what I did, the USB thumb drive never showed up as an option. I couldn’t boot from it in the traditional way.
Open Firmware
Whatever the reason, my last generation Power Mac G5 will only boot from the flash drive if I startup in Open Firmware. Hold down Cmd, Opt, O, and F at startup and hold them down until text appears on the upper left corner of your display. Your modern Mac be in Open Firmware (OF, as in two of the keys you hold down to boot into it). OF is a low-level operating system with a command line interface, like the Apple II+ at work that was the first computer I used, the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 that I used at home because they fit my low-end budget, and that Zenith Z-151 PC running MS-DOS 3.3 circa 1987.
Launch OF. That can take a while, as OF tests all your system memory every time you launch it. Just hold those 4 keys down until OF tells you to let go of them.
As long as you only have one bootable USB device, such as the flash drive with Lubuntu or an external CD-ROM or DVD drive, you can type in the following to boot from that device on a dual-core Power Mac G5:
boot ud:,:tbxi
and then hit Return or Enter. That worked perfectly with my Late 2005 Power Mac G5, but it would not work with my older 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5s no matter what I did, and I didn’t bother to try it on an iMac G5.
If you have more than one bootable device, type devalias at the prompt, hit Return, and you will see a lengthy list of devices like this.
That was a bit of a rabbit trail for me. In the end I found the command that let me boot from the front USB port on my older Power Mac G5 – these are all equivalent:
boot usb2/disk@1:2,yaboot
boot usb2/disk:2,yaboot
boot usb2/@1:2,yaboot
But that only worked on one of my Power Mac G5s. The other three I tried simply would not boot from the flash drive. This was an exercise in frustration!
Making a Bootable Linux Hard Drive
Once I saw that Lubuntu ran decently on my ancient Power Mac G5 Dual, I knew that I wanted to install it on a hard drive so it would boot more quickly and allow me to add more software. That would have been easy on the Dual, but I didn’t want to reformat either of its hard drives, so I went through my small collection of older Power Mac G5 models in search of one that would boot from the flash drive so I could easily reformat its hard drive and install Lubuntu.
When I finally got one up and running – the third one I tried (the first one wouldn’t even boot, the second wouldn’t boot from the flash drive) – I started the installer. I really appreciate the concise, thorough, helpful explanations of what each choice means. It’s the kind of polish we don’t see with the Mac OS; Apple knows that most of us just want it to run. Ubuntu knows that we are interested in making informed decisions and that it needs to educate us through the process. Nice!
Or so it seemed. Then it wanted to upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, but every time I tried to do that, it nattered at me about removing certain files using sudo and compressing other files – neither of which I am able to do. How can I remove 35.6 M of files when I don’t even know what’s necessary?
Okay, I should have just started with the Lubuntu 16.04 ISO, but I didn’t know it at the time. If you want to try Linux on a PowerPC Mac, choose the 16.04 Long Term Release (LTR) version and be done with big upgrades until the next LTR version, probably in April 2018.
If you’re just experimenting, you might want to use Lubuntu 17.04. And if you’re patient, you might want to wait until April when Lubuntu 18.04 LTR is due.
Lesson Learned: Burn a Disc Instead!
I wanted you to understand the frustration of trying to do things with a USB flash drive before telling you to bite the bullet and burn a DVD-R disk with the distro of your choosing. You can burn a CD-R, but that usually means trimming the Linux distro to fit on a disc. With DVD-R you’ve got lots of room for distros approaching 1 GB in size.
And you don’t have to use Open Firmware at all.
Booting from the DVD-R was a breeze after all the frustration I had to deal with creating a bootable flash drive and then actually booting from it. I wiped the 80 GB drive in a 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5 with 3 GB RAM and installed Lubuntu. I ended up with a very nice, friendly, functional Linux machine that lets me run the latest version of Firefox on a 2005 Power Mac that was left behind with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard shipped in August 2009.
Is It Practical?
There are two questions to address here: Is it practical to continue using PowerPC Macs in 2018? And is it practical to run Linux on PowerPC Macs instead of OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard?
Hardware
For those who have a Power Mac G5 Quad, the last and most powerful PowerPC Mac ever, the answer is a resounding yes. With four cores running at 2.5 GHz, you’ve got comparable power to the earliest 4-core Mac Pro. This is lustworthy hardware, although not especially practical in terms of the current it draws.
Dual-processor and dual-core Power Mac G5s are competent performers, and the faster dual-processor Power Mac G4 machines are solid workhorses as well with decent amounts of power. I wouldn’t want to use a Power Mac below 800 MHz or so with Tiger or Leopard, but dual 733 MHz or faster CPUs work well enough.
There may be tasks where processing power isn’t an issue, perhaps a home file server or web server, and there even a 233 MHz iMac G3 may provide all the power you need. Using MAMP, Tiger and Leopard can be configured as Unix servers.
Operating System
If you’re wed to Mac software, Linux probably isn’t going to be on our daily driver Mac. There is a whole learning curve going to a different operating system and using primarily free open source software that may have the power of commercial apps – but you need to figure out how to access it.
But if you want to set up a machine with an up-to-date operating system and browser that can be used more like a Chromebook than a Mac, Linux could be for you. Firefox is a staple in the Linux world, and the latest version is fast with a reduced memory footprint. I can run it on my Power Mac G5 Dual nicely. Not as nicely as a 3 GHz Core i3 iMac, but nicely nonetheless.
Honestly, I would go the triple-boot route. Today I put separate Tiger and Leopard partitions on any G4 or G5 Mac I set up, usually with Leopard getting 2-3 times as much space as Tiger, depending on the size of the hard drive. To learn to live in the Linux world, I would go with two hard drives when possible – one just for Linux, which likes to partition its hard drive just so – and one with partitions for Tiger and Leopard.
Facebook: Ouch
Facebook is a remarkably bloated environment, and you’ve probably been spoiled with modern hardware or the mobile version. Even on my dual-core 2.3 GHz G5, Facebook is frustratingly slow. You can really speed it up by going to m.facebook.com instead of www.facebook.com. That puts you in the mobile version, which has its own drawbacks but runs a lot faster than the desktop version.
Conclusion
Don’t try to do it on your own. We’ve created a helpful Facebook group of people who have managed to get Linux running on PowerPC hardware and those who are learning how. Linux on PowerPC Macs was invaluable in helping me get this far.
keywords: #ppclinux #linuxonmac
short link: https://goo.gl/anff6h
On Tuesday, January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that it had made HTML5 video its default instead of Adobe Flash, which is still be supported. What does this mean for Mac users?
HTML5 video doesn’t require additional software, which immediately sets it apart from Flash video. Further, HTML5 video is supported on some older hardware and operating systems that Flash no longer supports – PowerPC in particular.
That said, HTML5 video isn’t a single thing. There are three different types of video encoding supported by HTML5:
- H.264/MP4, promoted by Apple and Google, integrated into QuickTime
- patent-free Ogg Theora, promoted by Mozilla and Opera
- royalty-free WebM, sponsored by Google
Some browsers support all three, some two, some only one, and some old browsers none at all.
Each of these video formats has its pros and cons, with H.264 generally considered the most efficient, but with the drawback that it is not patent- or royalty-free.
I have been testing HTML5 video support on a variety of browsers supported by Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on PowerPC hardware. My test machines are a dual 1.25 GHz MDD Power Mac G4 and a dual 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5. The test page I’m using is http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html
Video performance will vary depending on the speed of your internet connection, processor speed, the number of CPUs in your Mac, and your video card.
OS X 10.4.11 Tiger Results
- Safari is the Mac’s default browser, and version 4.1.3 is the last supported in Tiger. Only H.264/MP4 video is supported.
- Opera 10.6.3 supports Theora, but does not display H.264 or WebM.
- TenFourFox is our standard recommendation for Tiger users. It is a PowerPC specific port of Mozilla (a.k.a. Firefox) that is optimized for G3, G5, and two varieties of G4 CPUs. The current version is 31.4.0, and I used it with QuickTime Enabler v.120 installed, which lets TFF use QuickTime to display video. Theora works nicely, WebM works very poorly on the G5 but nicely on the G4, and H.264 does not work at all.
Apple Power Mac G5
Our advice to Tiger users: Use Safari for H.264 and TenFourFox for Theora and WebM.
OS X 10.5.8 Leopard Results
- Leopard runs a newer version of Safari, 5.0.6, which only supports H.264/MP4 video, not WebM or Theora. Video on the G5 is very smooth.
- Opera 10.6.3 is the most recent version for Leopard as well as Tiger on PowerPC Macs. As with Tiger, only Theora displays video. Quality is good on the G5 and not bad on the G4.
- TenFourFox provides WebM and Theora playback, but not H.264. Theora seems a bit smoother than WebM on the G5.
- Aurora is a Leopard-specific build of TenFourFox that is currently at version 20.0a2. It supports H.264, WebM, and Theora video – all very nicely on my G5.
- Stainless is intended to provide PowerPC Mac users a browser that works similarly to Google Chrome by running separate processes for improved speed and stability with a reduced memory footprint. It supports H.264/MP4, but not the other standards.
- Roccat is a newer browser designed to work on both Macs (OS X 10.5 and later) and iDevices. It only supports H.264/MP4.
- On a lark, I gave the ancient Camino browser a try. It only supports Theora. (It doesn’t support anything on Tiger.)
Our advice to Leopard users: Give Aurora a try, because it’s the only PPC Leopard browser to support all three protocols.
For details on how well each browser performs with YouTube, see HTML5 Video Performance on PowerPC Macs.
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Results
With the impending demise of Dropbox on Macs running Tiger and Leopard, a lot of PowerPC users are going to be looking at low-end Intel Macs, and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is the hands-down choice. It’s very similar to Leopard in the way it works (none of this Lion-and-beyond nonsense of replacing Save As… with Duplicate, for instance), is the last version of OS X that can still run PowerPC software, and has a smaller footprint than more recent versions of OS X.
Snow Leopard is Intel-only and will give you access to lots of newer software written only for the Intel OS X platform. If you’re on Intel, there really is no reason to stick with Tiger or Leopard; Snow Leopard is the cat’s meow.
Quicker work on all devices, as well as assist for VST2, VST3, AU and AAX. Now with visualization of the signal-flow to give you real-time suggestions. Fully revamped effects page. Nexus free download for mac.
I have a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo Mid 2007 Mac mini with 3 GB RAM and OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard installed, which is my primary production machine alongside a 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook with OS X 10.9 Mavericks that I use when in the field. The Core 2 Duo Mini was fairly low-end when it was introduced over seven years ago and has become more so over time.
- Safari 5.1.10 is the newest version of Apple’s browser supported by Snow Leopard. It’s H.264 support is very good, and there is still no support for Theora or WebM video.
- Opera 12.13 supports Theora nicely, WebM decently, and H.264 not at all.
- Firefox 35.0.1 supports all three standards.
- Stainless on Intel/Snow Leopard takes a step forward, supporting both H.264 and WebM, but not Theora.
- Like Firefox, Google Chrome supports H.264, WebM, and Theora.
- Roccat on Snow Leopard supports both H.264 and WebM, but not Theora.
Our advice to Snow Leopard users: Google Chrome and Firefox both support all three HTML5 video protocols. Give each a try to see which you prefer.
For details on how well each browser performs with YouTube, see HTML5 Video Performance on PowerPC Macs.
Keywords: #html5video
Short link: http://goo.gl/ulHwkl
Power Mac G5 Specifications
searchword: html5video