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A Mac Mini G4 Tangent

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Icon credit to Kyo-Tux via the Creative Commons license 4.0

I’ve always wanted a Mac Mini G4.

I grabbed a cheap one off of eBay sometime ago, and I’ve had it sitting around waiting for the right stretch of free time to open it up and go to work. It’s turned out to be kind of a pain to work on, in truth. It is awfully tight once you pop off that top case and start trying to tinker around.

In general, I would only pay money for a 1.42 Ghz or 1.5 Ghz version. If you can, get the latest version since it has a bit more kick and a little more VRAM. The entry level versions though are only worth it if you can get them free. Once updated and refreshed, they don’t run TenFourFox too bad and make nice writing machines in particular.

On my 1.42 Ghz Mac Mini, I decided to repurpose my old Corsair 60GB SSD with a $4 IDE-to-SATA adapter. (It took forever for that tiny adapter to arrive via mail from China.) I used Corsair tools on my Windows machine to refresh the Corsair back to its stock speed with a secure erase. I also maxed out the ram for $20, though it was probably workable to stay with 512 MB if you aren’t going to do much browsing. Installing these upgrades was, again, a pain. The SSD is really just hanging in there, although there seems to be enough pressures from the sides of the plastic enclosure to keep it steady. Taking it apart also meant dealing with its fickle bluetooth cable. I don’t think I put it back together in quite the exact way it came, but it fits.

On the first try, the Mac Mini would not boot from my DVD nor would it eject my DVD! I had noticed that there was a little jumper on the IDE-to-SATA adapter, and that it would work fine in that state. After various troubleshooting techniques, I had to pull apart the thing again, pull off that jumper, and try to make it fit securely. This time, the Leopard DVD booted right up, even though the built-in speaker stopped working. It’s probably disconnected, but that’s not critical.

I went to work installing Leopard, updating the machine, and putting on the few programs I am going to keep on there. Part of this included doing a few cosmetic changes to the system, including the Mountain Leopard theme, for instance. In an attempt to install a special dock, though, I accidentally put a version of SIMBL that started causing the G4 to freak out, hang, and act like it was seriously messed up. Deleting SIMBL restored the G4 to solid operation.

As it is now, the G4 runs pretty well. The SSD definitely helps, although it seems like the motherboard is more of a bottleneck than the drive. WriteRoom serves as a perfect beautiful text editor/writer. I have future plans for the machine as a file server as well, but that will come another day.

Sorry for the tangent – we’ll get back to some crucial G5 info soon.

— Nathan

The Saga of the SSD

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My New Year’s resolution has been to get a larger SSD working in my Power Mac G5. It did not start out well.

I’ve detailed elsewhere about my first bad experience with a PNY Optima at a steal of a price. Darn, I wished that thing worked.

Next up was a 120 GB Intel 520 SSD at a nice sale price from Amazon for around $60. I noted on my own hardware page on this site that it should be a good and solid drive to use. Some G5 owners seemed to have gotten it to work. When the package arrived in the mail, I went to work, dropping it into my G5 and hoping that I would not see the same symptoms that I saw with the PNY.

And then, the drive didn’t show up.

It was like a ghost. My machine booted without trouble. It acted like nothing was wrong. The drive would not make an appearance in Disk Utility at all via the app or command line.

So, once again, troubled but undeterred, I sent it back. This time, I ordered a OWC drive that was guaranteed to work in my G5. I paid $10 more than the Intel, but at least my journey would come to an end.

OWC Mercury SSD

And then, this drive didn’t show up in Disk Utility either.

Now, I was confused. I tried my troubleshooting steps. I put it into a different bay, which can be a problem with some configurations on Power Mac G5s. (This really needs more exploration.) I made sure it was correctly plugged in. I put it into a USB drive to make sure it was operational – it was! At this point, even though my old SSD worked just as normal when slotted back in its place, I was beginning to think I was having serious motherboard issues.

Now, let me offer the twist – all along, I had removed my original SSD in place of this new SSD. My plan was to reinstall Leopard from a Time Machine backup that resided on the other internal hard drive I have in the G5. To do this, I planned to use my Leopard DVD (10.5.2) to boot, but whenever I went into Disk Utility from that install DVD, the SSD never appeared – not for the Intel 520 nor the OWC.

On a whim, I put my G5 into Firewire target disk mode and connected it to my Mac Mini G4. Upon boot, I was greeted with Finder’s familiar and suddenly very friendly warning that I had inserted an uninitialized disk. “Would I like to initialize it?” Of course! From this G4 running 10.5.8, Disk Utility saw the SSD and was gladly willing to partition and format it for me. Once again though, the Leopard DVD refused to see this now initialized drive, so I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner, that external USB drive, and my G4 to clone the hard drives, bless them, and begin my new adventure with my OWC SSD. Wow.

Here is what we know:

  • The PNY Optima drive, especially the version with the Silicon Motion controller, does not work in a G5 in any configuration.
  • The Intel 520 SSD probably does not work, although I don’t believe I tried putting it into Firewire target disk mode and connecting it to the G4.
  • OWC SSDs do work.
  • If your Leopard install DVD is at 10.5.2 or below, it may not have the appropriate drivers, kernel extensions, or something else to see newer drives. I don’t know what different versions of Leopard install DVDs exist, so if anyone else has some clarity, I’d love to include it on the website.

Using old Macs like these G5s is always an adventure. I’m just glad in my case there was a happy ending.

BTW, we now have search on the left side of this page.

Guess what? You can use iCloud Drive on a Power Mac G5

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On the Office page here, I have a little section about iCloud compatibility, mentioning that basically Leopard and PowerPC Macs are left out in the cold.

But today, I realized that all is not lost.

First, I will update the iCloud information on the site just to make sure all the options are clear. You can use your iCloud email with Mail.app, since it works pretty typical of email. You can use the iCloud website to access lots of goodies – it works great in TenFourFox. There is probably some way to use your iCloud calendar if you use a Google Calendar as a go between.

But here is the simple way to begin to access iCloud Drive files on your G5.

You will want to use symlinks with Dropbox (or another file syncing cloud software of choice).

In truth, this is a pretty simple solution, and I was kind of disappointed that I did not think about it earlier. To back up, here’s the challenge. I’ve been writing a lot lately using MarkDown, as previous posts indicate. My preferred client on my Macbook Pro is Byword, which integrates really well with iCloud Drive and syncs with my iPhone and its Byword app. I can save files outside of that drive, and so one option was to simply use Dropbox for all of my file syncing and ignore iCloud Drive. But, it was kind of late to do that, as I was already using iCloud Drive quite extensively. This is not a problem on a Windows machine, by the way, as you can setup iCloud Drive on it.

So, what do you do on a Power Mac G5?

Here’s the thing, you need to start with your newer Mac. (I suppose there might be a way on your Windows machine, but I haven’t explored symlink capabilities on it.) You can use an app like MacDropAny if you get nervous about tinkering with the command line, but in truth, it’s super simple. The terminal line is:

ln -s /link/to/original/file/or/folder /link/to/destination/folder

This page has a great diagram to show how this works in Mac OS X, if you are a little more of a visual learner.

The key is that you fill in the location of your Byword folder (or any other folder of choice) in the first part of that command and then point the other end to a folder or location in your Dropbox folder. Suddenly, your Dropbox folder will begin to sync those iCloud files in its magical way. Suddenly, even on your ancient Power Mac G5, you can edit and access iCloud files for fun and profit.

This is a huge and quite simple thing for me, as I will be able to spend more time writing on my G5 and MBP and iOS device, sharing files between them all. Cool stuff. And best of all, there really shouldn’t be any downsides to this option unless I fill up Dropbox.

Theoretically, you could use Dropbox in this way to sync your entire iCloud Drive, making every file there completely accessible to an older Mac or another computer. Just keep in mind the built-in Dropbox limits if you try this. Plus, you will likely encounter incompatibilities between some types of files – say older versus newer versions of Pages. But, hey, it’s a possible solution which is great for us G5 users.

By the way, if you want to do more symlinking, grab the SymbolicLinker plugin to use on your PowerPC computer of choice. It creates a contextual menu option in the Finder, so you can go crazy with it.

— Nathan

Minecraft on a G5

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I use my tattered old Dell to play an occasional game, including hosting a simple Minecraft server.

It’s a fun game, probably one of the better games made in quite some time because of its open-ended, creative mix of gameplay. I always tell skeptical adults that it’s like “legos for your computer”. My youngsters love to watch me play it, asking me to build or make things, explore caverns, or just try out stuff. Unlike some other games, it really opens imaginative possibilities that many other games and types of games fail to do.

Believe it or not, it is possible to play Minecraft on a G5. You must stick to Minecraft 1.5.1, a much older version than the current release (which is around 1.8.1, I think). Some good people over at the MacRumors forum have even setup a server just for these older G5 users. It looks sweet.

Check out this thread for discussion on the server and directions to finding the right client and launcher to run the thing.

I have not tried this yet, and it seems like it requires a special cracked version of Minecraft, which I certainly don’t have. (And is probably not legal?)

Check out some of the Youtube videos linked in that thread – cute stuff.

— Nathan

Happy New Year & Adblock

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I’ve got some new mini-projects for my G5 on the horizon, including a shiny new SSD with a Sandforce controller that should work quite well compared to the PNY Optima (with a Silicon Motion controller).

But in the meanwhile, I posted some comments over at the TenFourFox blog to this effect – do Ad Block options really make a difference memory/speed wise for our G5s? Since some of us do not have quad core machines, we need to worry about squeezing every little bit of performance. While ad block extensions for Firefox sure remove a lot of annoyances that the web offers, do they also slow down our browsing?

I tried with an eyeball test this morning, nothing scientific. With Ad Block Edge, which I have preferred in the past, my RAM usage was around 355 MB on average. From what I have heard, Edge maintains lists of urls of known ad servers to block images/content from, but they do this after the page has already loaded, going through the urls one by one. There is some overhead to this process.

Another option mentioned to me was Bluhell Firewall which takes some of the overhead out of it. In their not very satisfying words, they explain that:

How this is achieved is thanks to just seven hard-coded blocking rules covering about 8400 .com and .net domains, these were auto-generated from Easylist. That means, every time a certain resource wants to be loaded we will have to iterate through a list of seven compiled patterns, rather than for each entry from a common Easylist which contains hundreds of different items to check.

An eyeball test suggests that the memory hovers now around 250 MB in regular usage. That is probably not significant for someone with 2 GB or more of RAM, but for a Mac Mini or some other machine limited in RAM, it could be a helpful avenue to explore.

I want to stress that this was just a quick test, and there are likely other factors that influence RAM usage and the overall feel of the browser. I am switching over to Bluhell on my G5 for the time being. I can always jump back to Ad Block Edge if I feel it isn’t doing an adequate job.

Enjoy your day and year!

— Nathan