The Beginning or the End?

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It was bound to happen sooner or later. Today, Dropbox blasted emails out to Leopard and Tiger users to let them know that as of May 18, they will be dropping support for these older operating systems.

This is a huge bummer. For one thing, it might mean that I move completely away from Dropbox. I loved having a sync option that worked on all of my computers, from Windows to iOS to new and older Macs. But if my G5 can’t use it (except through its rather less useful web interface), then I may have to look at rolling my own.

I’ll have to do some fresh exploring of this in future blog updates. If you didn’t get the update, here’s the info below.

Hi Nathan,

We noticed that you’re running the Dropbox desktop application (client) on an older operating system (OS X Tiger 10.4 or OS X Leopard 10.5). We’re writing to let you know that as of May 18th, Dropbox will no longer support these older versions of OS X.

Don’t worry – your files and photos aren’t going anywhere! But you’ll need to update your computer to OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 or later to access them through the Dropbox desktop application. Apple’s instructions on how to update your operating system can be found here.

If you don’t want to update your operating system, your files will still be available through the Dropbox website. However, on May 18th you’ll be signed out of your Dropbox account on your computer and the Dropbox desktop application will no longer be accessible.

We apologize for the inconvenience. For more information, please check out our Help Center.

Sincerely,
– The Dropbox Team

Not happy, Dropbox. Not happy at all.

Here are some followup links to add your voice:

Maritn Kukac posted an open letter to Dropbox on his blog.

Many PPC users are posting on the Dropbox forums with their feedback to this decision. Add your voice.

— Nathan

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