iMac G4 best OS?

[VanneDC]

Gday everyone,

I've got a top of the range lampshade iMac G4.. which is pretty much doing sweet FA.
Was thinking of bringing it home and seeing if I can install something modern on it, it's the 17 inch one.

Is there any way to get Minecraft running on this for my little daughter?What's the best OS for this baby?

I guess Morph OS is out?

 

[CooperBox]

Sorry I can't offer any advise about running Minecraft, but someone here will surely know the answer.
Congrats. on finding an iMac G4 'lampshade', 'sunflower' or tournesol as they're commonly known in my location. Actually with the 17" (I assume it's the PowerMac6.1 USB2 1.25GHz model) as opposed to the earlier 800MHz or 1GHz USB1 models) what you have is almost the "top of the range" model. The ultimate G4 iMac is the 20" 1.25GHz, with 2GB memory is imho a formidable machine. Certainly not rare, but pretty scarce, they're worth tracking down as they're getting more & more sought after.
I run my 15 & 17" usb1 models with OS Tiger, the 17" usb2 and 20" models with Leopard.

 

[eyoungren]

Gday everyone,

I've got a top of the range lampshade iMac G4.. which is pretty much doing sweet FA.
Was thinking of bringing it home and seeing if I can install something modern on it, it's the 17 inch one.

Is there any way to get Minecraft running on this for my little daughter?What's the best OS for this baby?

I guess Morph OS is out?

The latest Mac OS you can run is OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.

You can install Linux, but I wouldn't know what to advise you on that score as I understand drivers are an issue and various version are in different states of operation for PowerPC Macs.

You can run Minecraft, there's a thread in here with many pages, but again I'm not much help there.

 

[z970]

I'd recommend Tiger paired with TenFourFox. And I'd advise you to use @eyoungren's tweaks in TFF, which I've found to help speed it quite well. You can find both of them here.

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-tenfourfox-about-config-tweaks-and-my-addons.1838393/

Minecraft? Right here.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-cider-powerpcs-minecraft-solution.1827849/

If you end up with Linux, I'd suggest either Lubuntu or Ubuntu MATE.

Hope I helped.

 

[VanneDC]

I'd recommend Tiger paired with TenFourFox. And I'd advise you to use @eyoungren's tweaks in TFF, which I've found to help speed it quite well. You can find both of them here.

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-tenfourfox-about-config-tweaks-and-my-addons.1838393/

Minecraft? Right here.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-cider-powerpcs-minecraft-solution.1827849/

If you end up with Linux, I'd suggest either Lubuntu or Ubuntu MATE.

Hope I helped.

[doublepost=1507675974][/doublepost]Cheers guys, much appreciated.. I am not sure i could live with Tiger.. (on there now) if choosing one of those Linus flavours (was reading about PPC mint last night too) will they have hardware acceleration for the Geforce MX card thats in there?

thx z970mp and the other guys for the advise.

 

[MysticCow]

Oddly enough, my answer cannot be MorphOS! It isn't supported.

If we're staying with Apple's MacOS, then the question then becomes, "Are you, at any possible point, going to need the Classic Environment for anything whatsoever INCLUDING RETRO GAMING?" If that answer is "yes," then you need to either partition for a dual Tiger (with Classic) and Leopard boot.

If you believe you will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever in the history of ever need to use the Classic Environment, INCLUDING RETRO GAMING, then you can go with a Leopard-only hard drive.

 

[eyoungren]

If you believe you will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever in the history of ever need to use the Classic Environment, INCLUDING RETRO GAMING, then you can go with a Leopard-only hard drive.

Never.

If I need that I'll pull out Sheepshaver or a OS9 only Mac.

I spent years trying to get rid of the OS9 albatross around my OS X neck and when I finally no longer needed QuarkXPress 4.1 for Classifieds that PM 7200 went bye bye home and hasn't been booted since.

Sorry, I know you were responding to OP. But just had to comment.

 

[z970]

Wait you had a 1.25 GHz build? Damn, I forgot.

In that case, yeah, go ahead with Leopard if you want. But if you do end up going down that route, I'd HIGHLY suggest checking out a couple of threads and articles on at least making Leopard a bit snappier. Here's some.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1137452/leopard_slimdown.html

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-leopard-speed-improvements.1723868/

(Word to the wise on the second link, I wouldn't tamper with BeamSync, QuartzGL, or Quartz2DExtreme. Not on an iMac G4.)

Hope I helped. Again.

 

[AphoticD]

Never.

If I need that I'll pull out Sheepshaver or a OS9 only Mac.

I spent years trying to get rid of the OS9 albatross around my OS X neck and when I finally no longer needed QuarkXPress 4.1 for Classifieds that PM 7200 went bye bye home and hasn't been booted since.

Sorry, I know you were responding to OP. But just had to comment.

You really don’t like Tiger do you.

 

[z970]

You really don’t like Tiger do you.

Personally, I'd install Tiger on all PowerPC Macs. Sort of like Snow Leopard on Intel Macs.

Not to mention the fact that no PowerPC Mac ever shipped with Leopard...

 

[AphoticD]

Wait you had a 1.25 GHz build? Damn, I forgot.

In that case, yeah, go ahead with Leopard if you want. But if you do end up going down that route, I'd HIGHLY suggest checking out a couple of threads and articles on at least making Leopard a bit snappier. Here's some.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1137452/leopard_slimdown.html

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-leopard-speed-improvements.1723868/

(Word to the wise on the second link, I wouldn't tamper with BeamSync, QuartzGL, or Quartz2DExtreme. Not on an iMac G4.)

Hope I helped. Again.

I can confirm that enabling Quartz2DExtreme/QuartzGL may speed up some graphics operations but does not improve usability and in some apps like WebKit, it will massively hinder performance. It is a cool GPU accelerated technology which was never made ready for prime time on PowerPC.

Also, others have confirmed that Disabling BeamSync has had negative effects. I personally didn’t notice a difference so I’ve always left it at its default state.
[doublepost=1507682192][/doublepost]

Personally, I'd install Tiger on all PowerPC Macs. Sort of like Snow Leopard on Intel Macs.

Not to mention the fact that no PowerPC Mac ever shipped with Leopard...

It’s a matter of preference. I prefer Leopard on all of my supported (867Mhz and faster) PowerPCs and Tiger on anything older. I also have a soft spot for Panther and keep this as an option on a few of my Macs.

I like the general snappiness of Tiger, but love my full suite of apps in Leopard, Especially on the G5. That and Leopard looks and feels more “mature”.

For the best experience with Leopard, 1GB or more of RAM is essential. Whereas Tiger is slick with just 512MB.

 

[eyoungren]

You really don’t like Tiger do you.

Tiger and I have a bad history when it comes to work, Windows Server, PC networking and file transfers.

I used to spend a lot of unproductive time cursing it. The kick in the head was in 2013 when I was trying to use it as a print server and it failed miserably and often. Hence the second G4 at work is running Leopard and actiing as the print server.

Outside of that, I have no real complaints when it was installed on my own systems.

 

[wicknix]

I also have to say Leopard. Even on my first ibook g4 which was 933mhz with 640mb ram, leopard ran quite well with a few tweaks. You'll also have a better web browsing experience with not only TFF, but also webkit and roccat, along with working youtube using roccat with user agent set as ipad, or smtube.

I did wind up putting Tiger back on that machine after i picked up my 1.42ghz ibook g4 however because i now use that machine for "classic" stuff. That's my 2 cents worth of input.

Cheers

 

[bobesch]

Oh, a 1.25 iMac G4 is a great device ...
I'd swap the drive for an SSD and dual-boot Tiger&Leopard.
Tiger especially to get hands on Classic and games from MacintoshGarden.
Leopard for the "Modern" part with WebKit4Leopard, which is snappier the TFF.
Forget about Minecraft... that will be a disappointment - but you may try to run MC on a fast intel-Mac and allow ScreenSharing with the Lamp... but I don't know, if that will be really working at all.
The Lamp might be also a nice music-machine accessing any shared iTunes library...
No idea about Linux-options for old Macs at all - but they would you cut you off somehow from your other Apple-ecosystem...

 

[VanneDC]

Thx heaps for the input gang. Decided to put the Lamp back in the box for a while. Retro gaming any as far back as the 2nd original NWN saga (the original was actually over modem based) and possibly WC3 / original Starcraft. that would be about it. I do lots of text based mu*s/d/x etc, so no dramas there.
would have been an easy choice is BeOS R5 would have been compatible..
anyways, looks like ill go yo leopard.

thx again everyone

 

[Jessica Fa Metadata]

Minecraft is at 2.0 and the server is at 1.5 a old version that no one uses other then MLP mods and if you like Modaka Magica mod. I would put Linux or FreeBSD on it. Why just compile moonlight and buy your self a computer that has a good compatible graphics card and then you can stream EVERYTHING to your G4. I am not kidding there are plenty of videos on youtube. The issue with Minecraft is one of the depenacy's in 1.7 is not available on PowerPC so if you were to run it you would need to enable QEMU to emulate the X86 cpu emualtion when you run those types of programs. The same thing if you want to run Wine apps. Some one please make a video of that. Gaming on a System like that with Linux is impossible, and it is doable on OSX. It seems like every forgets that the Sims and Sims 2 complete collections were ported over. Also if you got BE OS 5 you can run the port of Civ call 2 power. If you get a top of the line G5 you can run Windows 2000 and play civ 2. I don't think that was ported to OSX as Micropose did not have money for new hardware at the time so they focused on Windows. Running Linux on any thing other then X86 is now a lost cause and it is better to beet on FreeBSD as they care about what there fellow users think unlike Ubuntu!