Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Do any of you daily drive a PPC Mac?

sparty411 said:
I've considered shelling out for a new battery for my 15" DLSD, but I'm more interested in seeing whether or not I can just replace the cells in the battery packs I own. I've seen a youtube video by the 8-bit guy, (formerly ibook-guy)where he replaced the cells in a clamshell battery, and it seemed to work fine.
[doublepost=1562346763][/doublepost]
Okay, I replaced the default Iceweasel prefs.js file with the one from my TFF installation, and it does seem to be a fair bit quicker. The most noticeable thing, is the fact that it is using significantly less RAM, than TFF does, which is nice, because I'm swapping less to the HDD now. (It usually creates a ton of heat on the left palm rest where the drive is located).
Click to expand...
I've considered trying to change the cells in a Pismo battery, but understand it wouldn't work because of the chip. Does the 8-bit guy have a way round this?

Cheers 🙂

Hugh
 
Daily driver is an rMBP (see sig). The whole ecosystem with the iOS devices is just seamless for the most part, and the battery lasts for ever.

When I've got something that's a suitable PowerPC task, then I'll use one for the job.
 
  • Like
Reactions: netsrot39
sparty411 said:
I'm genuinely curious whether or not anyone here uses a PowerPC Mac as their daily driver, and if so, what machine and OS do you use?
Click to expand...

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X 10.5.8. I am pretty sure that the PowerPC isn't running an undocumented system all the time that has access to everything.

The 12" PowerBook is way easier to travel with than the bulky laptop device. I prefer the keyboard on the PowerBook to the sad keyboards on so-called modern devices. I can plug an Ethernet cable directly into the PowerBook!

The applications I use are all just a little bit better on PowerPC Macs...

I am back to using Apple Mail on the PowerBook because Thunderbird seems to be missing on the other device.

TenFourFox7450 is my browser of choice. I do use Firefox with uMatrix and Chromium on the other device. Also, I kid you not, I need to run Adobe Flash which only has Intel binaries these days, and thankfully even a binary for Linux. If there was a way to run a newer version of Adobe Flash on a PowerPC Mac, I would. Anyways, in the not too distant future, Adobe Flash might go away, at which point things get interesting for the PowerPC Mac as a daily driver. Watching and/or editing videos is not something I do daily. And, don't get me ranting about inane Youtube channels -- except for all those wonderful cat videos.

Preview, scanning and printing work like a charm on the PowerPC Mac. Not so well, on the other device -- the salesperson at Costco said that the Dell with Windows8 works really well -- except for later when you can't print.

Image Capture for the actual scanning and moving photos and videos off of devices. I guess you can do this on other devices but it is more of a pain, and some of it wants to take your media and put it in something called a cloud which I hear can go down or simply fade away with all of your media which is actually their media if you bothered to read the fine print.

Screen Sharing so I can use other PowerPC Macs. I can't be bothered with Vinagre or whatever it was called and it was buggy and weird.

Terminal. Yes, I use something called xfce4-terminal on the other device and a lot more than I should need to. Terminal on the PowerPC Mac edges out xfce4-terminal, and of course I can ssh to other devices from the PowerBook.

TextEdit. Yes, I use something called MousePad, but again TextEdit is just a bit better program.

Xcode.

KEGSMAC.
 
  • Like
Reactions: amagichnich, B S Magnet, sparty411 and 1 other person
My DD personal laptop, and the computer I use most-often for tasks not related to my job is my 15" DLSD G4 with 2GB of RAM, and an SSD, running Leopard. It does the usual expected stuff on the web, Microsoft Office, TeamViewer to my Win2k server, ssh to my Debian server, occasional prototyping in Python, and has even stepped in to allow me to do some things for work when my work-supplied MBP was down.

That said, I could not use it as a daily for my job, as the software required does not support PPC. I work on an internal web app that only officially supports Chrome, so that's a non-starter. Our local dev environments also depend on Docker, which even if it were PPC-compatible, stretches the i7 in the work MBP to its limit.

The only regularly done "non-work" tasks that don't fall to the PB is modern-ish PC gaming and editing 1080p x264 video for my church, and those duties go to my now 10-year old Windows desktop.

Oh, and like others mentioned I have a 1GHz iBook G4 running Debian 8 as a headless server running OwnCloud with a 4 TB RAID 1 connected to it via FireWire. That of course stays up 24/7.
 
  • Like
Reactions: sparty411 and eyoungren
Hughmac said:
I've considered trying to change the cells in a Pismo battery, but understand it wouldn't work because of the chip. Does the 8-bit guy have a way round this?

Cheers 🙂

Hugh
Click to expand...
He never actually mentioned anything, regarding the microcontroller in the battery. Isn't there a way to short it, so it resets or something?
 
sparty411 said:
He never actually mentioned anything, regarding the microcontroller in the battery. Isn't there a way to short it, so it resets or something?
Click to expand...
The only thing I know of is to reset nvram in OF, which is supposed to reset the battery chip (maybe 😉).
Just now I have been lucky enough to source an allegedly working Lombard battery on eBay, so I'll not be needing to rebuild my own for a while.

Cheers 🙂

Hugh
 
sparty411 said:
I wonder how much longer Dr. Kaiser will continue working on TFF. Judging by his blog posts, he doesn't appear to plan on giving it up any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

But recent development achievements and potential expansion is slowing, to be sure. I believe TenNineFox (POWER9) is succeeding TenFourFox (10.4).

At this point, all I think that's left is slight JavaScript tweaks, security updates, and slimming. Tremendous, tremendous slimming.

Although, I'm still hoping he updates Classila alongside the last version of TFF...
 
"Daily drive" as in "use on a daily basis" : my 12" 1.33 iBook with 10.5.8 and the 15" 1.67 PB.
But, not at work - I have to connect to two monitors and two RDP sessions to Win Server 2016. Right now it's a windows machine but soon it might be the new Raspi 🙄
I do have other "modern" machines, mainly for running Steam games and watching Netflix. Though I do use my PPCs for as much as they can handle. Surfing, writing, Music (listening, not producing) , DVDs, YouTube, image editing (CS2 and CS4), presentations with PowerPoint '08 - what else do you need? 😎😀
[doublepost=1562706222][/doublepost]Also I installed Debian 8 on an unused 12" 1.2 GHz iBook and started using that. But now as Buster came out... I might have to check that out 😀
 
  • Like
Reactions: sparty411 and z970
amagichnich said:
Also I installed Debian 8 on an unused 12" 1.2 GHz iBook and started using that. But now as Buster came out... I might have to check that out 😀
Click to expand...

PowerPC Buster is not the official release. It's essentially a snapshot of Sid on release day, as at that point in time, Sid (basically) = Buster. And although newer than the final Wheezy, Jessie, and 14.04 point releases, it will not be receiving updates past July 2019 as it is, effectively, a snapshot in time.

Just wanted to clarify that. Now, check away! 😀
 
  • Like
Reactions: dextructor
I used to have a dual 1.33 (OC'd, of course) MDD as my main machine until September last year. But the darn 2GiB ram ceiling became too low for my needs. I still don't understand why that limit is there, with the CPU being able to address more than that.

Since then I've been looking for a PowerMac G5, but alas, the three I've come across had dead boards...
 
Fami7455 said:
I used to have a dual 1.33 (OC'd, of course) MDD as my main machine until September last year. But the darn 2GiB ram ceiling became too low for my needs. I still don't understand why that limit is there, with the CPU being able to address more than that.

Since then I've been looking for a PowerMac G5, but alas, the three I've come across had dead boards...
Click to expand...

I think you posted in the thread last week with the spam guy, correct?
 
Last edited:
Fami7455 said:
But the darn 2GiB ram ceiling became too low for my needs. I still don't understand why that limit is there, with the CPU being able to address more than that.
Click to expand...
It's a limitation of a component on the logicboard I believe, not the CPU.

@LightBulbFun can explain more on that (he's mentioned something about it here before).
 
the CPUs might have a 4GB address space, but sadly the Uninorth 2 Memory controller of the MDD can only handle 2GB of RAM max
 
The main issue IMO for daily driving PowerPC systems is lack of software support.
If LibreOffice still supported Leopard, then any office work that my Intel laptop handles, could work on PowerPC.
If Firefox were still fully supported, or if there were an up-to-date build of WebKit or Chromium, internet browsing would render nicely(although very slow).
If there were still updated versions of Java, Flash, and OpenSSL, security wouldn't even be an issue.
If Spotify and Pandora still supported MacOS Leopard, music streaming would still work.
If the major Linux distro's were still pushing out PowerPC builds, then software support in general wouldn't be an issue.

For me, it all comes down to software support and parts availability. I won't daily drive a system if I can't find parts for it, or people to repair it. If I daily drive a PowerMac G5, and the CPU fails, I can't just go on Newegg and buy a new G5 CPU, I need to track one down on eBay and hope it still works. GPU fails, I need to find another one online, hope it still works, and hope that it doesn't need to be re-flashed to work on PowerPC computers.
 
@mzs.112000 Most of those issues are already solved on Linux, and the newest Debian versions are still being pushed out for PPC.

My PowerBook G4 is playing very well with LibreOffice 6.3.
 
mzs.112000 said:
The main issue IMO for daily driving PowerPC systems is lack of software support.
If LibreOffice still supported Leopard, then any office work that my Intel laptop handles, could work on PowerPC.
If Firefox were still fully supported, or if there were an up-to-date build of WebKit or Chromium, internet browsing would render nicely(although very slow).
If there were still updated versions of Java, Flash, and OpenSSL, security wouldn't even be an issue.
If Spotify and Pandora still supported MacOS Leopard, music streaming would still work.
If the major Linux distro's were still pushing out PowerPC builds, then software support in general wouldn't be an issue.

For me, it all comes down to software support and parts availability. I won't daily drive a system if I can't find parts for it, or people to repair it. If I daily drive a PowerMac G5, and the CPU fails, I can't just go on Newegg and buy a new G5 CPU, I need to track one down on eBay and hope it still works. GPU fails, I need to find another one online, hope it still works, and hope that it doesn't need to be re-flashed to work on PowerPC computers.
Click to expand...
Well…yeah.

If Adobe were still supporting Leopard I could run Adobe CC 2019.

If Quark Inc. was still supporting Leopard I could run QuarkXPress 2018.

If Extensis were still supporting Suitcase on Leopard I could run the latest version of Suitcase Fusion.

If Dropbox were still supporting Leopard I wouldn't need a PC laptop to act as a network bridge.

On and on…

But the problem with software support is the OS. The reason all these companies stopped supporting Leopard is because Leopard doesn't have the same internal features and functions that later versions of OS X have.

Backporting a feature so it works on Leopard like it does on macOS is just not that easy, requires a lot of time and money and for the handful of people still using these systems is therefore not worth it.

I wish it were as simple as you seem to be implying it is.
 
  • Like
Reactions: B S Magnet, sparty411, MagicBoy and 1 other person
I prefer to think of my PowerPC systems as mature, rather than outdated. They do quite literally everything that I want them to do; unfortunately there are some things that I have to do, that they can't handle. Such is life.

It's like climbing a mountain. You only want to climb a mature mountain. Say, a peak in the Rockies, or the Alps, the Himalayas, whatever. You don't want to climb an immature, always changing mountain ...because that's a volcano. Don't play on a volcano!!!

I can still do cool things on my mature, stable old granite mountains. And I have lots of fun doing these things, and learning about new things to do on the mountain that I haven't tried yet. And nice people who share my love of the mountains keep building things to give me new ways of doing all the cool stuff I like to do there.

Mountain life is good life 😀
 
  • Like
Reactions: crimsonRE, dextructor, bobesch and 5 others
Raging Dufus said:
I prefer to think of my PowerPC systems as mature, rather than outdated. They do quite literally everything that I want them to do; unfortunately there are some things that I have to do, that they can't handle. Such is life.

It's like climbing a mountain. You only want to climb a mature mountain. Say, a peak in the Rockies, or the Alps, the Himalayas, whatever. You don't want to climb an immature, always changing mountain ...because that's a volcano. Don't play on a volcano!!!

I can still do cool things on my mature, stable old granite mountains. And I have lots of fun doing these things, and learning about new things to do on the mountain that I haven't tried yet. And nice people who share my love of the mountains keep building things to give me new ways of doing all the cool stuff I like to do there.

Mountain life is good life 😀
Click to expand...

I agree. My video editing setup is a DC 2.3 G5 with a Kona 3 card. It handles 1080p ProRes with ease in FCP 6 and I have no real reason to change my workflow, it's literally worked for me for over a decade. I know my final renders for distribution in formats like .h264 and webm are longer than modern machines but I start those final renders and walk away to do other things. I'll challenge anyone to tell me what can not be accomplished with Final Cut Studio 2 and Adobe CS4, nothing my clients ask for has out-scoped the abilities of those software packages.

I daily drive a G5 DC 2.3 because it does what I need it to do without complaint, no notifications, no software updates, no distractions.
 
  • Like
Reactions: amagichnich, Raging Dufus, bobesch and 4 others
I don't use a PPC as a daily anymore, but I used to. Currently, I have 4 computers:

A PowerBook G4 1.67 15". I write novels on it and Office 08 tends to work well with Office 19.

A MacBook 4,1. This is my email checker and test machine. I'm currently about to try Catalina on an external SSD. It's gonna suck.

A Surface Pro 1. This is my daily driver. I hate Windows 10, but I can't argue the portability.

An HP Hackintosh running 10.12. My editing Rig. I needed a pro Apple didn't sell at the time.


EDIT: I now own 5 computers. Picked up a 2010 MacBook Pro for $114 this morning.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back