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- HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. UPDATE 7/27/2015: Official download link has been fixed. System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later, PowerPC G4 or G5.
- 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.
Power Mac G5 Ios
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. Ifinance for mac torrent software.
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.
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. Tunnelbear for mac.
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
V ray for sketchup mac. It's stunning V-Ray Clipper lets you to easily make section renders and quick cutaways. It contains CPU and GPU-accelerated denoising for noise removal and render times cut.
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
What?! Does something about this article seem odd, not as you remember, or too good to be true? Check the date it was published!
The French start-up software company Freedom Technologies today announced the immediate availability of CountDown G5, a controversial firmware update which enables users to start up Apple's Power Mac G5 systems using either Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X.
As shipped by Apple, Power Mac G5 systems can start up using only Mac OS X (although they can run older software in the Classic environment). But now, Mac OS 9 users can enjoy the performance and raw power of the Power Mac G5 system if they do not want to use Mac OS X, or are still among those users for whom Mac OS X versions of needed software are not yet available. CountDown G5's methods are not subtle, and using CountDown G5 to create a Mac OS 9-bootable system could leave you with an unsupported hybrid machine, jeopardize your warranty, or create unexpected problems with future operating system updates. However, if you simply must have G5 power within Mac OS 9 – and if the Mac OS X Classic environment doesn't cut the mustard – then CountDown G5 is your only option.
How CountDown G5 Works — CountDown G5 updates the Power Mac G5 firmware to allow the machine to start up using Mac OS 9 as well as Mac OS X – following the update, the Power Mac G5 will recognize bootable Mac OS 9.2.2 volumes as viable startup volumes, as well as volumes with Mac OS X 10.2.7 or newer installed. CountDown G5's method of updating the Power Mac G5's firmware is exactly the same as that which Apple would use if a flaw or incompatibility necessitated a change (such as the firmware updates issued for early iMacs, without which installing Mac OS X 10.2 or higher can render a machine inoperable).
Despite all the new subsystems and processor technologies in the Power Mac G5s, Freedom Technologies learned that the systems' firmware packages aren't terribly different from firmware shipped in Mac OS 9-compatible machines. Using careful black-box reverse engineering, they were able to determine which portions of the Power Mac G5 firmware needed to be changed to provide Mac OS 9 compatibility, and exactly what those changes should be. Although Apple did not perform extensive compatibility testing of the Power Mac G5 hardware from Mac OS 9 – since they anticipated all access would be moderated by Mac OS X – Freedom Technologies engineers reported discovering no significant problems accessing all the Power Mac's features from Mac OS 9, in part because many of the new technologies (including FireWire 800 and USB 2.0) are based on open standards for which complete technical specifications are available. According to CountDown G5's lead developer, in the handful of instances where incompatibilities were found, working around them was only a small portion of the engineering effort.
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
What?! Does something about this article seem odd, not as you remember, or too good to be true? Check the date it was published!
The French start-up software company Freedom Technologies today announced the immediate availability of CountDown G5, a controversial firmware update which enables users to start up Apple's Power Mac G5 systems using either Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X.
As shipped by Apple, Power Mac G5 systems can start up using only Mac OS X (although they can run older software in the Classic environment). But now, Mac OS 9 users can enjoy the performance and raw power of the Power Mac G5 system if they do not want to use Mac OS X, or are still among those users for whom Mac OS X versions of needed software are not yet available. CountDown G5's methods are not subtle, and using CountDown G5 to create a Mac OS 9-bootable system could leave you with an unsupported hybrid machine, jeopardize your warranty, or create unexpected problems with future operating system updates. However, if you simply must have G5 power within Mac OS 9 – and if the Mac OS X Classic environment doesn't cut the mustard – then CountDown G5 is your only option.
How CountDown G5 Works — CountDown G5 updates the Power Mac G5 firmware to allow the machine to start up using Mac OS 9 as well as Mac OS X – following the update, the Power Mac G5 will recognize bootable Mac OS 9.2.2 volumes as viable startup volumes, as well as volumes with Mac OS X 10.2.7 or newer installed. CountDown G5's method of updating the Power Mac G5's firmware is exactly the same as that which Apple would use if a flaw or incompatibility necessitated a change (such as the firmware updates issued for early iMacs, without which installing Mac OS X 10.2 or higher can render a machine inoperable).
Despite all the new subsystems and processor technologies in the Power Mac G5s, Freedom Technologies learned that the systems' firmware packages aren't terribly different from firmware shipped in Mac OS 9-compatible machines. Using careful black-box reverse engineering, they were able to determine which portions of the Power Mac G5 firmware needed to be changed to provide Mac OS 9 compatibility, and exactly what those changes should be. Although Apple did not perform extensive compatibility testing of the Power Mac G5 hardware from Mac OS 9 – since they anticipated all access would be moderated by Mac OS X – Freedom Technologies engineers reported discovering no significant problems accessing all the Power Mac's features from Mac OS 9, in part because many of the new technologies (including FireWire 800 and USB 2.0) are based on open standards for which complete technical specifications are available. According to CountDown G5's lead developer, in the handful of instances where incompatibilities were found, working around them was only a small portion of the engineering effort.
When started up from Mac OS 9, however, Power Mac G5 systems do not take advantage of the G5 processor's native 64-bit mode: Apple would need to rewrite Mac OS 9 for 64-bit compatibility, and it goes without saying that Apple is expending virtually no development resources on Mac OS 9 these days. Similarly, Freedom Technologies cannot guarantee any particular driver or peripheral will work with G5 systems booting Mac OS 9, since they have no control over how third party vendors developed their software drivers. CountDown's release notes cover cases of known incompatibilities (currently a handful of USB printers and digital cameras).
T Minus 10 — CountDown G5 installs from its own CD-ROM: users insert the disk, restart while pressing C, and respond to the prompts once the system starts up. The installer is emphatic about confirming that the user understands the nature of the CountDown G5 product and is certain they wish to install it: you cannot mindlessly click through the CountDown G5 installer or walk through quickly by pressing Return. Default buttons and the nature of dialogs change, and users must successfully answer a quiz (as well as input a serial number) to install the product.
Power Mac G5 Software
The reason for these extreme precautions is simple: once you install CountDown G5, there's no going back. Freedom Technologies cannot legally provide Apple's default firmware as an uninstall option, and Apple itself provides no way to re-install the firmware which ships on Power Mac G5 systems. Installing CountDown G5 is a one-way ticket, and users would be well-advised to do it only when plugged into a UPS: if the power were to fail during the two-minute installation process, there may be no way to recover the Power Mac G5 without replacing the motherboard.
Users should also note that installing CountDown G5 in all likelihood voids Apple's warranty, although Apple has not yet made a formal statement on the subject. Similarly, warranties of third-party hardware products may not apply to CountDown G5-enabled systems. In particular, Macintosh peripherals developed with only Mac OS X in mind are extremely unlikely to work under Mac OS 9, even on G5 systems running CountDown G5, since no Mac OS 9 drivers will be available for those devices. Examples include third-party mice and input devices, scanners, and printers, although some devices (such as external hard drives) which are Mac OS 9-compatible should work without a hitch.
Lift Off! CountDown G5 1.0 is presently available only for Apple's Power Mac G5 systems and will refuse to install on any other Apple hardware. Freedom Technologies says they're looking into producing versions of CountDown for modern iMacs as well as Apple's high-end laptops, but their focus is on Apple's professional Power Mac G5 users. Freedom Technologies will have to update CountDown for any new Power Mac G5 systems Apple releases, as well as for any firmware revisions Apple slips into its production cycle. Freedom Technologies offers a tiny application (a 240K download) which reveals whether CountDown is compatible with the firmware in a particular Power Mac G5 system.
CountDown G5 1.0 is available immediately to citizens of E.U. member states for 50 euros; U.S. citizens must pay an additional technology export duty which will bring the total cost to between $95 and $110, depending on currency values and the status of technology trade agreements. CountDown G5 is available only on serialized CD-ROM; there is no downloadable version.
