Finally Back From Limbo

• I have 2x 1TB hard drives in my G4. You can pick them up fairly cheap now.
• Currently, in the forums a flashed FireGL X3 is the hot graphics card to have.
• That'd be Airport Extreme right?
• You can pick up a Belkin adapter for less than $10 off eBay if you want to go this route. I have BT on my Quicksilver, a Mac that never came with BT.
• Can't help you with the Linux/UNIX stuff.
• Prices on the A1006 (ADC/DVI) converter have really dropped on eBay. I got two for $50 about six months or so ago. Also, with the aluminum displays, they have some active method that allows a passive ADC/DVI converter to work. The G5 my boss got in 2005 came with one.

Not so much liking the overhaul of MR, although there are some new features that are cool.

 

1. I recommend going for a ATI Radeon 9600 XT. It is a good balance of performance and affordability although the FireGL X3 that eyoungren mentioned will be a much better card if you can afford it.

2. I would go for a solid USB wireless adapter like the Netgear WNA1000m or Ethernet rather than using the wireless G AirPort card.

3. Rocketfish makes a micro USB Bluetooth adapter that is under $10 now on eBay and works beautifully in 10.4 and 10.5.

4. OS X Leopard 10.5 all the way with TenFourFox!

5. You can get a ADC --> DVI adapter for about $25. It is a little dongle and they work great!

 

Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS supports PowerPC, it will have support until 2019 and is stable. MATE does not use a lot of RAM or CPU, so it would be perfect for G3's and low-spec G4's, OR if you want a really fast G5.
But nVidia support on Linux for PowerPC is not very good, and with some Radeon cards there are some issues( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnownIssues ), but most can be fixed using that link.

 

Funny story, I traded an old iMac for a 15' 2005 PowerBook G4 on craigslist recently. Me and the guy started talking and it turned out he was a big developer for the PowerPC version of Ubuntu Mate (Turns out it's pronounced Ubuntu Mah-tay). He asked me if I ran it on my G5 and I told him no because it doesn't support my video card. He asked which card I had. I have the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. He told me he was going to get to work and get a small team working on supporting more cards. So I can't assure you that more support is coming, but they are aware and will give it a shot.

 

@WalnutSpice What type of iMac did you trade for the PowerBook?

 

Early 2006 1.86GHz Intel Core Duo / 2GB RAM /128MB VRAM. I bought it for $40 to replace my G5, but I found my G5 was a lot faster than it so I just never used it.

 

The Core Duo models really can't keep up with the G5s even today. Sure they have a newer software selection, but the performance is not very good. The G5 with some older software still works great for nearly everything I do!

 

Also, Core Duos are limited to Lion and use 32 bit architecture, leading to more software incompatibility

 

I thought CoreDuos were limited to Snow Leopard and Core2Duo was a minimum for Lion.

 

Forgot the 2 lol sorry

 

Mac OS X Lion does run on the Intel Core Duo but it's not officially supported.

 

Yeah, I bought it listed as a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo but I got it as only a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo. I didn't mind though because it was in way better condition that the sellers Core 2 Duo iMac.

 

The Core 2 Duos still make a fine machine for a daily driver, but the Core Duos are really starting to show their age...

 

Yeah. I got mine cheap though, $40. And although I did run Windows Vista on it with all the latest programs, it still wasn't good enough to keep. The G5 may not support most new stuff, but it blows that thing out the water in performance. Although I do have a 2 year old WD Blue 1TB drive in the G5 and the iMac had the original 120GB HDD from 2006. So that probably made it slower than it really was.

 

Man did we stray miles away from the topic of Ubuntu Mate.

 

Would a G5 be able to keep up with a Pentium D E5300(that is the pile of garbage in my Hackintosh)? Or is the Pentium D faster?

EDIT: According to old Apple tech documents the G5 runs at a "blistering" 76.6 GFLOPs(probably just marketing?), compared to my Pentium D at 16 GFLOPs.
Oh, this is the tech document, for a 2.5Ghz Quad: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA118/en_US/PowerMacG5Late2005_TechBrief.pdf

 

That would be closer, not too sure because I don't have benchmarks from a Pentium D.

 

Only the Quad. With a Universal Binary app the Core Duo when launched would generally show a faster clock speed Dual PowerMac G5 a clean pair of heels. I bought a few magazines around the time the first Intel machines came out

No such thing as a Pentium D E5300. The Pentium D 800/900 series was a pair of P4 NetBurst 500/600 cores on a single chip. The Pentium E was a crippled Core2Duo for the low-end. A 1.8GHz P-E was about equal to a 3.2GHz Pentium D 940 with half the power consumption.

 

I do not have benchmarks on that CPU but I believe you should not focus on benchmarks but rather real world performance.

I believe that depends on the program as well...

 

It can be very subjective but there's no substitute for experience: I switched from a G5 Dual 2.0 to a 1.83 C2D iMac for graphic design - which in benchmarks was about 40% faster and certainly could in particular tasks out-gun the G5 but overall the experience was inferior and I quickly went back to the G5.
In retrospect, it was probably the poor integrated graphics that let it down.

 

Sorry, my earlier post was incomplete for some reason. In early '06 there were not many Universal apps from vendors other than Apple and PPC apps would naturally put Intel macs at a disadvantage due to using Rosetta.

I think it was Computer Power User that had a good article from one of the well respected tech authors using real world benchmarks. I bought it in the U.S. for flight reading just after I got my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately it got recycled a few years ago.

As for the C2D iMac, that should have shipped with an ATI card, unless it was some sort of bottom end education only model?

 

As far as I know, the 1.83 C2D iMac was only available with Intel graphics, the CD 1.83 was available in ATI and Intel flavours.
I was primarily using Adobe CS3 on mine, which is Universal but everything seemed 'clunky' compared with the G5 - which as I said, was probably just the graphics giving that impression.

 

All the launch all Core Duo machines (MacBook Pro, iMac) had ATI X1600 graphics. They may well have added GMA950 to the iMac later.

 

My white iMac feels slower at some things but powers through the web much easier than my PowerMac. I have the X1600 in the iMac and even then sometimes it will still struggle when graphically intensive operations are running. I have a 9800 Pro in the G5 which I am comparing it to.