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Just how far can we go?

As to the original question, how far can we go....

I duno. Just learnt that firefox is pushing for developement of html5 web apps. If it succeeds, who knows how long we can go.
 
" The question is not how far. The question is, do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?"
 
apple apple said:
As to the original question, how far can we go....

I duno. Just learnt that firefox is pushing for developement of html5 web apps. If it succeeds, who knows how long we can go.
Click to expand...

It's been said before, we will be able to go as long as our PowerPC Macs can physically last, although there may be some shortcomings. HTML5 provides a promising future for our beloved, well-aging machines.
 
eyoungren said:
Do you have T4Fx optimized?

Any speed customization you see for Firefox can be applied in about:config in the same way in T4Fx. It's based on the same code. Pipelining, ngpaintdelay, animations off, etc. A bunch of stuff that can be edited in about:config.

Lastly, what about addons? NoScript, Request Policy, AdBlock Plus (or Edge)? Do you use any of those?

Granted, you'll never get the speed you'd get on say an Intel Mac, but there are plenty of things you can do to optimize performance.
Click to expand...

I'm really curious as to what optimizations to make. I'm familiar with the about:config interface, but feel lost in what to look for and what to set to get the best performance possible.

What settings need to be tweaked to get best performance? What are the "must-have" plug-ins and settings? Maybe someone could write a tutorial in a separate thread?

The one thing I did to speed things up was simply to force TFF to use a single font: DejaVu Sans, an open license font from http://dejavu-fonts.org/. Pages load quickly and look pretty good, too.
 
vlark said:
I'm really curious as to what optimizations to make. I'm familiar with the about:config interface, but feel lost in what to look for and what to set to get the best performance possible.

What settings need to be tweaked to get best performance? What are the "must-have" plug-ins and settings? Maybe someone could write a tutorial in a separate thread?

The one thing I did to speed things up was simply to force TFF to use a single font: DejaVu Sans, an open license font from http://dejavu-fonts.org/. Pages load quickly and look pretty good, too.
Click to expand...
Well, that's another request for this, so I guess I am going to be doing a second one soon.

I did a post a year or so ago, listing my tweaks to about:config. At the time I was heavily using TOR, so some of those tweaks and addon suggestions were referenced in there.

My biggest hurdle is that I don't know everything I've done. The T4Fx profile that I am using now with all it's optimizations is the same profile I was using in Firefox 3. That profile has bounced from there to Sea Monkey, to Flock and then to TenFourFox and AuroraFox. Along the way I've made adjustments over time. Some of the stuff in there may not apply anymore.

So, I'm going to have to sort it all out, including the addons I use.

However, as a start, you might want to look up pipelining. Just put that word in there. There will be a few options (https and http) with a value. The default is 1 I believe. They suggest no more than 8, but I usually put in 99.

Pipelining controls how may requests your browser makes of the remote server. The default of 1 means it makes one request at a time. Letting it make more than one means it can speed things up because it's making multiple requests.

Also, if you want the page to display immediately instead of waiting for all items to download, set the ngpaintdelay to 0. Keep in mind that what this means is that the browser will take whatever it's receiving and start throwing it up on your screen. It inteprets the content later once it's received it all. So, the look of the page is going to change as the browser receives and then translates the elements.

I'll see about getting something up this week.
 
Now that I have my TiBook in good shape and with a good battery, I've actually been making a point to use it as much as possible this weekend.

It's running currently 10.4, although mine is one of a handful of TiBooks that can officially install 10.5 without using a work-around(it has an 867mhz processor). I upgraded it to 1gb of RAM, so now that I've done that I'll go ahead and install Leopard in the next few days.

A few weeks back, I picked up a first generation Airport Extreme router. The original Airport cards can't connect to my main household router, so I connected the Airport Extreme to the main router and set up a separate network for my original Airport devices(which are beginning to get numerous). The Airport cards-despite being 802.11b-are surprisingly fast in this configuration. If I'm downloading a big file, things still move a lot faster connecting directly to the router by Gigabit ethernet, but otherwise for normal browsing it's fine.

I've done a fair bit of "real work" this weekend, including using the TiBook exclusively to photograph items for Ebay and list a handful of Ebay auctions. Photographing, doing light editing(rotating and cropping) in Preview, then uploading the photos and writing the descriptions took about as long as doing the same on my 2011 Macbook Pro. I was forced to use the "non flash" version of Ebay's photo uploader, which I actually prefer to the fancier but no more functional one that I typically use.

So, at least for myself, this 11+ year old laptop is actually pulling its own weight and still remains a viable computer for many purposes.

I won't go into the stuff that I do on my Quicksilver and G5, which of course blow the Powerbook out of the water in performance.
 
reply

crammedberry said:
Luckily I didn't run into many problems when I've tried it. Usually hardware acceleration works except my radeon 128 driver is so old it's been dropped from support. This is a computer from 2001 and the card was already old then. There is a way to go around that but I haven't tried breaking my head with it yet, I may try it later, although at 8mb of VRAM I don't see if there is much to be gained.

I know Debian has a 64bit PPC official version, hopefully they will work on making that install easier for you, it's been getting better over time. For 32bit ancient macs though it's a no-brainer. I can surf the web, send emails, all the basics on a 15 year old computer - something I didn't except 15 years back, so yes Linux is PowerPC utopia at least in my experience. You may want to try Debian with your G5, Ubuntu and mintPPC all gave me problems as well so I went with the "harder" install and that worked flawlessly.
Click to expand...

I want to say I gave Debian or a variant of it a try and ended up with the exact same problems as with Ubuntu.

556fmjoe said:
The current version of Fedora is reported to work on G5s as well. They mainly test it on modern POWER systems, but their site claims it works on the G5.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I'll have to give it a look.

jrsx said:
I'm sticking with Mac OS as long as I can. I've tried Linux, and it comes nowhere near Mac OS X imo.
If you do like Linux better for whatever reason, MintPPC is what worked best for me. Wifi on my iBook worked out of the box, the only thing that didn't was sound, but there is a bug fix for that.
Click to expand...

eyoungren said:
Yes. Whether you are a Tiger fan, a Leopard fan, or even a fan of earlier versions including OS9, a big part that all of us share in common (and what drew a lot of us to Mac) is the Apple OS.

Take OS X (and OS9) out of the equation and you have a Mac that has no soul. It's merely Linux functioning inside a beautiful case, much like the way later versions of OS X function inside Intel Macs.

I applaud the Mac/Linux community. But, again, if I want Linux it's going to be a much better experience if I buy a dedicated PC machine for it.

Some things are just better suited for what they what they were originally designed for.
Click to expand...

Linux isn't my thing either, I just feel that OSX is at a dead end on the G5 right now, and Linux (if fully supported) can restore the lost functionality to the hardware and get it back on its feet by having a current operating system, modern web browser, modern flash player, greater software selection in general, and no more obnoxious OSX mouse acceleration.

JohnnyH1012 said:
It's been said before, we will be able to go as long as our PowerPC Macs can physically last, although there may be some shortcomings. HTML5 provides a promising future for our beloved, well-aging machines.
Click to expand...

Yeah, a "promising future" of waiting hours for a web page to render.
 
Member2010 said:
Linux isn't my thing either, I just feel that OSX is at a dead end on the G5 right now, and Linux (if fully supported) can restore the lost functionality to the hardware and get it back on its feet by having a current operating system, modern web browser, modern flash player, greater software selection in general, and no more obnoxious OSX mouse acceleration.
Click to expand...
Well, System 6 and 7 are at a dead end too. But people own Classic Macs and pull them out for a specific purpose. No one is developing Linux to run on those systems in order to maximize their functionality.

I totally get your point and I'm all for it. My point, is simply that OS X is part of the charm of the PowerPC Macs and for me I do not see a point in running these Macs without OS X.

Eventually, I am going to need an Intel Mac to browse the web and I will get one. But for all the other Macs in my house that won't negate their purpose. They are already doing the tasks (other than web browsing) that have been set to them. Just like a Classic Mac running System 7 can do a task set to it that is within it's capabilities. So for me, even though I do eventually get this Intel Mac for browsing, all my other PowerPC Macs are still relevant with the hardware/software they have because their roles have not been affected.

But, again, for those that are wanting to go beyond this I am absolutely for Linux on PowerPC. It's just not my choice is all.
 
eyoungren said:
Well, System 6 and 7 are at a dead end too. But people own Classic Macs and pull them out for a specific purpose. No one is developing Linux to run on those systems in order to maximize their functionality.
Click to expand...

The only OS that being really worked to maximize PPC is Morph. That's pretty much it.
 
Member2010 said:
I want to say I gave Debian or a variant of it a try and ended up with the exact same problems as with Ubuntu.
Click to expand...

The distorted video that you're talking about, I have a PowerBook G4 with an FX go5200, it shouldn't be too different than the one you have on your G5. Well, with the stable install - wheezy, I saw some of the distorted video that you were talking about, however everything else seemed to work okay. I tried Jessie recently - used the Jessie installer as well for the testing distribution, it isn't for everyday use and it's essentially a beta. What I noticed from Jessie was that video just worked out of the box - no distortions seen in Wheezy etc. Jessie has a more recent nouveau driver, the open source nvidia driver and it seems that there has been lots of progress. I don't have sound under Jessie however so it's something that's broken in the beta, but I'm really happy with the video progress. If you have time to burn one evening maybe download the Jessie installer and give that a shot. Remember linux is still being developed for PPC and will continue to be so, that's always the upside as support will only get better.
 
I don't believe a Mac lost its soul once you put Linux on a PPC machine, you can still use "Mac On Linux" without completely ditching your OS X applications. Link: Mac On Linux

Desktop GeForce 5200 has more texture/shader pipelines than the mobile version in the 12" PowerBook G4, same can be said of the 15/17" ATI Radeon Mobility 9600/9700 vs desktop versions. Linux in general is a crapshot as some video cards have multiple editions to support in the drivers, GeForce 5200 for example has 12 different versions(64-bit bus, 128-bit bus, slower clock speed, nVidia reference clock speed, OC-editions, GDDR2 vs GDDR3, single monitor vs twin, etc) and ATI is even worse they created more reference designs of the 9600/9700 than nVidia has ever done.

I'm not so sure Linux PPC development will last that much longer beyond Debian, Ubuntu no longer "officially" supports it beyond the web-only limited support, Fedora PPC is "dead"(after PS3 OtherOS was axed) and ever since Sony yanked "OtherOS" from the Playstation 3 Slim you have even fewer modern consumer PPC hardware.
Linux will give PowerPC a longer life, however the limitations of G3/G4 are starting to creep up vs G5 when it comes to processor/RAM headroom. YouTube via Linux is smoother than OS X but at the same time you're slowly hitting increased swapfile usage. (Xubuntu/Lubuntu is a dog on my 12" PB after a few hours)
 
happyfrappy said:
I don't believe a Mac lost its soul once you put Linux on a PPC machine, you can still use "Mac On Linux" without completely ditching your OS X applications. Link: Mac On Linux

Desktop GeForce 5200 has more texture/shader pipelines than the mobile version in the 12" PowerBook G4, same can be said of the 15/17" ATI Radeon Mobility 9600/9700 vs desktop versions. Linux in general is a crapshot as some video cards have multiple editions to support in the drivers, GeForce 5200 for example has 12 different versions(64-bit bus, 128-bit bus, slower clock speed, nVidia reference clock speed, OC-editions, GDDR2 vs GDDR3, single monitor vs twin, etc) and ATI is even worse they created more reference designs of the 9600/9700 than nVidia has ever done.

I'm not so sure Linux PPC development will last that much longer beyond Debian, Ubuntu no longer "officially" supports it beyond the web-only limited support, Fedora PPC is "dead"(after PS3 OtherOS was axed) and ever since Sony yanked "OtherOS" from the Playstation 3 Slim you have even fewer modern consumer PPC hardware.
Linux will give PowerPC a longer life, however the limitations of G3/G4 are starting to creep up vs G5 when it comes to processor/RAM headroom. YouTube via Linux is smoother than OS X but at the same time you're slowly hitting increased swapfile usage. (Xubuntu/Lubuntu is a dog on my 12" PB after a few hours)
Click to expand...

I never liked any other Linux distros, but perhaps that's just me... I've always been a fan of Debian. It's rock solid, it has endless apps even for a discontinued platform like the PPC, overall it's a great OS. Ubuntu always ran slow for me, whether it was on a PPC or an Intel mac. Some people love it, others hate it, I neither love it nor hate it, I just know it is slow every time I've tried it. Debian has been the best. ATI drivers on the Linux side for PPC are actually quite nice, even the proprietary ones. nVidia proprietary drivers are amazing if you're on x86-64, not so great otherwise, especially not for PPC. This forces PPC users to rely on open source drivers such as nouveau. It's actually coming along great, for example I'm running a PowerBook G4 under Debian 7 with the nouveau driver and it runs great with some configuration, there is some distortion at first which I noticed had been fixed in Debian Jessie without the need for any tweaking. Overall I think it's moving in the right direction, and though perhaps PPC development won't spread out much beyond Debian, I don't think you really need anything else.
 
I agree. I also like Debian. On my netbook I rock elementary, but unfortunately its not made for ppc.

I am excited for Jessie to go stable (its set to freeze in November). I think Debian stable running xfce, whisker menu, and plank would be a pretty, solid and responsive system. May even consider upgrading to a modern "unsupported" video card at that point.
 
debian

crammedberry said:
The distorted video that you're talking about, I have a PowerBook G4 with an FX go5200, it shouldn't be too different than the one you have on your G5. Well, with the stable install - wheezy, I saw some of the distorted video that you were talking about, however everything else seemed to work okay. I tried Jessie recently - used the Jessie installer as well for the testing distribution, it isn't for everyday use and it's essentially a beta. What I noticed from Jessie was that video just worked out of the box - no distortions seen in Wheezy etc. Jessie has a more recent nouveau driver, the open source nvidia driver and it seems that there has been lots of progress. I don't have sound under Jessie however so it's something that's broken in the beta, but I'm really happy with the video progress. If you have time to burn one evening maybe download the Jessie installer and give that a shot. Remember linux is still being developed for PPC and will continue to be so, that's always the upside as support will only get better.
Click to expand...

Sounded like a good idea to me too, but I had no luck with that either. The install completes successfully (albeit slowly and with the fans roaring at hurricane force during the second half), but like some of the other OSes I tried, it just boots for a little while before ceasing to send video to the monitor. Since it's already installed, I might have a look at the debian forums to see what they have to say over there, but I'm not holding my breath.
 
apple apple said:
I agree. I also like Debian. On my netbook I rock elementary, but unfortunately its not made for ppc.

I am excited for Jessie to go stable (its set to freeze in November). I think Debian stable running xfce, whisker menu, and plank would be a pretty, solid and responsive system. May even consider upgrading to a modern "unsupported" video card at that point.
Click to expand...

I run Jessie on my ThinkPad and it's rock solid. I'm getting to like Gnome 3... It's growing on me.

For my Macs though, it's OS X!
 
Linux (Debian) will strecht the life of PowerPCs for at least 10 more years. Thing is that internet is becoming dumb and developers (or clients) keep throwing garbage in websites.

There are more ads than content. And giving "news" on slideshows are now popular, and that is just plain dumb. If this keeps going, we will need to buy a computer each year just to be able to read the news.

You can create a eye-candy web design without requiring a 8.2 Ghz C2D computer
 
Member2010 said:
Sounded like a good idea to me too, but I had no luck with that either. The install completes successfully (albeit slowly and with the fans roaring at hurricane force during the second half), but like some of the other OSes I tried, it just boots for a little while before ceasing to send video to the monitor. Since it's already installed, I might have a look at the debian forums to see what they have to say over there, but I'm not holding my breath.
Click to expand...

Well I'm hoping there will be a few improvements in the coming version. I too would recommend searching, or asking in the Debian forums for help. An option you may keep in mind is blacklisting the nouveau driver and relying on Nvidia's proprietary NV driver, or removing NV and using nouveau. Apparently keeping both in the same system causes trouble, that's something that has been talked about in the Debian forums from when I was reading through them.

I do hope you find a solution, it's unforunate that slower and less expensive computers from the time run so fluidly (iBooks etc) while the G5 sits there untapped. If I run into something that I think may be useful I'll be sure to mention it.
 
All the odds are turning against us as a community. Software developers aside from PowerPC saviors like Cameron Kaiser and Tobias Netzel have all but forgotten about us. Their programs are amazing and I truly do greatly appreciate their efforts as they greatly prolonged the life of our machines to this day.

Our machines are old. We do not need some members to repeat that or how Intel Macs are better. They are slowly but surely all encountering problems ranging from simple parts like RAM or hard drives to Logic Boards or CPU failures. Where do we draw the line?

This thread has gotten me thinking that there really isn't much life left in them aside from a collectors piece. As I upgrade everything around my G5 it changes the bottleneck from my peripherals to my G5. I spent much money over a few years getting my setup how I like it composed of a Studio Display, wireless aluminum keyboard, mouse, and trackpad, as well as FireWire hard drives and older AirPort Expresses to use as an AirPort bridge just to name a few things. $20 to upgrade to 4 GB of RAM, $35 on an iSight, $25 on a video card; it starts to add up and now it seems like the money was better saved than spent.

My G5 is making a strange fan sound, smells like thermal paste is burning, and my CPU 2 is 10 degrees hotter than CPU 1. Do I let it just die and go to the great iCloud? I really do not know any more. The Power Mac has served me well but finding someone else who it could serve well is tough in a world that values a computer on Instagram or Netflix performance. I do not value my computers based on their web capabilities but rather their capability in the job I want them to do. I want my G5 to edit photos, make videos, and do some programming. The first two are now taxing it with my camera's footage and photos. In 2003, the G5 was the top of the line machine for professionals and dreamed about by others, in 2014 it is a hobby for us all and trash to others.

As a community, what do you guys think in terms of life left? Does a G5 still have the horse power to make it another two years provided we have people like Kaiser, Netzel, and other developers alongside people like Intell, eyoungren, Cox Orange to share knowledge and others like gavinstubbs09 to donate his bandwidth, time, and knowledge in hosting a PowerPC archive for us all. I think we have two years left before they are collectors items more than anything, but I want to know your opinions. Stop laughing, Intelligent!
 
I've spent money on my PowerBook G4 to turn it into a modern very usable laptop computer. I have it upgraded to the Leopard OS, it has a IDE solid-state drive, and it now has a new battery to prolong usage time away from the outlet. I'm hoping to continue using this computer as a daily driver for the next year or so. I may be forced to sell it due to school funds, but as long as I can keep it up and running, it's quite a useful notebook. I really can't find anything I can't do on it! I see at least another two years out of just the notebook, and with all the upgrades, hopefully longer. For something like a G5, which albeit may have issues, is still much faster, I could easily see 3 years or so before PowerPCs become a thing of the past.
 
As far as Apple is concerned, PPC machines became things of the past as far back as 2006 and I am cool with that. Apple is a business and not sentimental about its products.

I am bidding on three PPC laptops today, none of which would be regarded as a collector's item, and do not expect to win because there will be competition. That is my answer.
 
weckart said:
As far as Apple is concerned, PPC machines became things of the past as far back as 2006 and I am cool with that. Apple is a business and not sentimental about its products.

I am bidding on three PPC laptops today, none of which would be regarded as a collector's item, and do not expect to win because there will be competition. That is my answer.
Click to expand...

10.6 didn't ship until August 2009, so I'm kind of wondering where the 2006 figure came from for lack of support. I know 2006 was the start of the transition to Intel, but PPC was still at least halfass supported, even after 10.6 hit.

Now to be fair, PowerPC has not been in a new Mac for 10 years now and Apple has cut off all support for years now. Also, with the way Apple has been doing incredibly stupid things lately, such as soldering everything down so there's zero upgrade potential, I'm not sure if my next computer will be a new Mac. I know my next laptop won't be one.
 
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