I highly recommend the following article which walks through an old Power Mac G5 in its capabilities and context in its day – why it was both an intriguing machine, a power hungry one, and a sign of imminent changes at Apple. Excellent, enjoyable read.
http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2017/11/apple-power-macintosh-g5-flame-on.html
— Nathan
The world has felt a little more apocalyptic as of late, so maybe it makes sense that all of a sudden we have a couple of “App Stores” for our PowerPC Macs running Leopard or Tiger. Is this something we need? Maybe. Maybe not. You get to decide.
The coder of this simple but effective app posted here on the site, so I am happy to share a link. The app is apparently built in RealBasic (like my own SimpleMarkPPC) and handily categorizes and links to a variety of useful software. The app is not going to be the most stylish one in the world, but it is effective and well-organized. I did notice a link or two pointing to Macintosh Garden, which might be something to frown up if you are a deeply ethical-minded person. Granted, this is the state of software for us PowerPC folks, so I’m not too concerned. But something to note. Keep an eye on his website for updates or to post suggestions.
Folded in as a part of LeopardRebirth, a PPC theme to make Leopard look more like Sierra, PPCStore is a little more elegant but sparse “app store”. I keep putting those words in quotes because I’m not really sure you can buy any apps in these stores. They are essentially just handy collected links to some useful software to grab. PPCStore is much more sparse than the previous entry, but it looks more like the typical App Store you may come to love or despise in later versions of Mac OS X.
As usual, these apps may or may not be useful to you, but I am grateful that fellow PPC heroes are trying their hand at software tools to make our G5s (and G4s) useful for a while yet. Awesome.
— Nathan
In more news along the solid state drive front, I got a fascinating conundrum from a loyal reader about issues with what we first wondered to be a failing motherboard or overheating.
After installing a new SSD and using it as the main drive, he reported beachballs and crashes after waking from sleep, forcing a shutdown. Sometimes, the G5 worked like a charm. Sometimes, everything ground to a halt. It didn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, kind of a random thing, which makes it difficult to track down.
I typed out my standard line of troubleshooting, starting with what changed. Did you install RAM recently? Put in a new hard drive? Install a new video card? Fiddle with something that you shouldn’t have? Then, go down the checklist of cleaning out the case, testing temperatures, double checking cables, switching RAM in and out, and so on until you figure it out. And if all of that fails, then flailing your arms in frustration because it might or might not be your motherboard.
But good news – the reader reinstalled the system on to a main hybrid drive, and things seem to be back to normal. It might be a faulty SATA cable, but it could be the G5’s implementation of the SATA standard which causes weird things with solid state drives. I’ve had an experience or two with such weird behavior. I would love to get hold of an engineer who helped make these G5s and could tell us more about the quirks and challenges of their hardware and where limitations lie. Maybe someday?
The moral of the story is to be cautious and careful with those SSDs. Your best bet is to go the OWC route, since they care about vintage computing. Or use the small list of suggested compatible drives on this website under “Hardware”.
— Nathan
Peter, one of the intelligent readers of this blog, wrote in with a nice money saving workaround to upgrade your video card to the best available option.
He suggests flashing a compatible FX4500.
In most benchmarks that I’ve seen, the FX4500 does edge the 7800GT in some tests. It was really designed to be more of a workstation card as opposed to a general usage or gaming card. You will probably see more benefits if you are rendering video or something of that nature, but as prices have fallen, it is cheaper to max out your G5 by grabbing one from eBay. Mac compatible ones, which may be just flashed cards, run around $100, but PC versions are available for $40-50.
Here’s an alternate route – get a PC version of this card and flash it. Peter tells us how:
It is trivial to flash a PC version of the NVIDIA Quadro FX4500 with the Mac firmware. These cards can be obtained on eBay for ~$30 and are much cheaper than the “Mac” versions, that typically cost around $100+. The only important thing is to make sure that the card you get has RAM on both sides of the card. Newest versions of the card only have RAM on one side of the card (the fan & cooler side) and will not work with the G5 (but they will work on the Mac Pro with the correct firmware).
This card has RAM on the back side of the board and is good for flashing with the G5 firmware:
This card does not have RAM on the back side and will not work with the G5 firmware:
You can find the ROM and utilities over at the Mac Elite wiki site.
This info has me tempted to try it on my own.
— Nathan
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
