I love getting feedback from readers that can help expand the information on the site.
One reader, xz, wrote in to share experiences with a couple of other SSDs. Consider them a review or confirmation, as individual results might vary in our particular G5s and their different specs. Read more:
I was browsing your site a while back when adding new life to this g5 powermac7,3 that I have; and I found the SSD section most helpful. Even purchased an Intel 320 (80GB) SSD. Also, wanted to let you know that I have an OCZ VERTEX2 120GB disk and it is working as my “Macintosh HD”, with no problems at all. Didn’t know if you’ve tested one with any hardware configurations in the past. Wanted to let you know that it does work, and works well! Thanks again for your site; one of my favs! Very helpful as well! Thanks and have a great day!
Thanks for the feedback! I hope this saves someone time or money as they scour the internet for deals to upgrade their G5.
I heartily recommend Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for your G5, though a lot of my readers get a ton of use out of Debian Linux or some other variant. That’s great. But there is one more option off the beaten path – MorphOS.
MorphOS is not an open source operating system. In fact, I initially thought it had some connections to AEROS, which is an attempt to use Linux underpinings to recreate the Amiga OS, but I was wrong. Amiga OS was never super popular, but it had its uses and was great for media editing workstations. In fact, that was my first experience working with any version of Amigo OS, way back in high school in a video production class.
I can’t say I have a love for Amiga OS or enough experience as to extoll its virtues, but MorphOS has emerged in recent years as a viable alternate for PowerPC machines. Again, it’s not open source, and you do have to pay for it. But you get a slick, capable enough operating system that continues to evolve and runs super fast on older machines, especially our Power Mac G5s (with some caveats).
Check out the video below, which mirrors my experience of giving MorphOS a test run on my Mac Mini G4. It boots and loads quick and is pretty damn responsive.
MorphOS continues to add support for PPC machines. Check to see if your G5 (or other older Mac) is compatible. It appears you can only use certain Mac models, but you also need a Radeon video card (meaning my G5 won’t run MorphOS). The base system comes with a small package of apps to get you started, including a decently updated Webkit browser. The GUI leaves something to be desired – I would like it to be a bit more clean, but it might work for you. I gave it a good run through on my Mini, and I really enjoyed the responsive and appearance of stability. Maybe when TenFourFox dies out, could this OS be an another option to keep these old Macs purring?
If you want to try it out, you can download a CD image and run a 30 minute demo. I’d recommend it if you want to burn an afternoon. You will have to pay around $79 Euros to get your own copy, but updates are free after that.
Dropbox is logging out PPC users left and right, deporting us from the land of simple file syncing functionality.
But the battle ain’t over yet.
I just did some goofy sleuthing around and experimenting, and I got Dropbox to log back in (for now). I don’t think this is a long term solution. No doubt, Dropbox will probably invite one of their programmers to block this solution (somehow) rather than figure out a simple legacy way to keep file syncing operational. For PPC users, if we want to keep using Dropbox, we will have to find another solution that is more permanent.
A couple of days ago, I was whining. I was trying to mock up a MarkDown app for PowerPC machines, and I kept running into stupid, silly bugs. I thought the story was over.
Then I woke up the next day with a fresh insight and perspective to these nagging bugs, and I found a way forward.
Today, I introduce to you the “alpha” release of SimpleMarkPPC (download).
SimpleMarkPPC is a very simple MarkDown editor for Power Macs. Essentially, it’s just a wrapper for the wonderful multimarkdown command line utility. You can create and load text files, mark them up with the elegant and responsive MarkDown code, and export them to html, LaTeX, or RTF. Though it may seem simple, MarkDown is actually quite complex and capable of a lot of cool stuff. Best of all, you don’t have to use brew to install multimarkdown yourself – I’ve embedded a compiled copy which should work on most Power Macs.
The app updates what you type on the fly by converting it from MarkDown into html, giving you a live preview of how your finished product might look. The conversion is darn good, although it is free of CSS. I’ve kept the app down to the bare bones and will work on polishing the user interface some more in the future.
I hope this is useful to you. It will remain free.
Here’s a tentative road map of what I will tackle next as I sharpen the program:
Reduce writes. Right now, to produce the live preview, the text and html files are saved to the disk every few seconds. I’ll find some ways to thrash the hard drive a little less.
Print. Got to add some printing capabilities.
Support for window resizing/full screen.
Font and window transparency options.
Making sure I am free software license compliant.
Get a better icon.
Please, please, please give it a whirl. Right now, it has been tested on my Power Mac G5 and my Mac Mini G4 in 10.5.8. What about a machine running Tiger? What about a G3 or older G4 Mac? I’d love your feedback.
In my search for an elegant MarkDown solution for my Power Mac G5, I have continued to dig into all kinds of options from fiddling with open source editors written in Python to building my own.
Programming on your G5 is actually pretty straightforward.
I remember the first Power Mac G4 I got my hands on at a previous IT job many years ago. As I was studying computer science at the time, my first action was to jump into terminal and see if “gcc” was really included by default. And sure enough, every Mac comes with a standard open source compiler. Cool!
Of course, if you want to build something beyond a simple command line app, you’ll need bigger and better tools. The best is XCode, which you could typically install as an extra from your Leopard DVD. You can still grab XCode 3.1.1 from the Apple Developer site here. You will have to log in.
There are other options too.
One of my preferred options over the years was Real Basic. Today, it’s called Xojo, since it really has nothing to do with the BASIC programming language that some of us encountered years ago. Real Basic was an interesting tool because it let you start at the end of your coding process by building the GUI app first and then adding in the functionality you want to have happen. The code is also fairly readable and simpler than Objective C at the cost of a lot of potential fine tuning.
My first experience with Real Basic was with an academic version in my IT position. We needed an OS 8.6 compatible screen lock to have students log into lab computers with a pass phrase. I whipped one up in like 30 minutes using Real Basic.
On Leopard, I’ve used Real Basic to create game character generators and other basic text manipulating utilities in a pretty short amount of time. I’ve grown to like some of its features even as other things drive me nuts.
To bring this home, I decided to crank out a couple of MarkDown attempts using Real Basic. The last version to work on Power Macs is 2009R3. I first built some basic code that would automatically edit what you type into a rich text field and catch MarkDown formatting. While it sort of half worked, it was way too complicated after even just a few basic formatting commands.
I then used “brew” to install the ever useful multimarkdown command line utility which can take a text file with MarkDown formatting and turn it into a pdf, html file, or whatever. It’s a really great option for working with MarkDown. In Real Basic then, I created a simple window with a rich text field on one side and a live preview html window on the other. As you typed, the program would quickly use multimarkdown to generate preview html of your document. It was dead simple and started me down the path to a solution.
But then I hit a road block – whenever the live html preview updated, it would steal focus from the rich text field. No matter the workarounds I tried, there was no way around this. It turned out to be a bug that was eventually fixed in a later version of Real Basic, which won’t run on my machine.
This is life with older machines.
If you happen to have a license of Xojo/Real Basic, they will still let you download an access key and older copies of its software. I recommend it if you want to mess around with some simple prototype apps or invite a young person to learn some basic coding building blocks. But where you save time, you’ll ultimately also give up the ability to have an app do what you want it to do.
