Leopard & CoreImage on B&W G3 (with G4 upgrade) Sucess!!!

A nice job, but you definitely don't have it running on a b&w G3 since the cpu is a G4. A good technical achievement nonetheless.

 

I'm still trying to get a good deal on a graphics card for my (upgraded) 1.8GHz Digital Audio system since the 9700 Pro I bought awhile back will not run correctly on this system (died after a week and a replacement doesn't work either). Meanwhile, I'm stuck running the ancient ATI Rage 128 it came with. Suffice to say with (only) Sata hard drives, 1.5GB of ram and that 7448 G4, this thing is more than capable of running Leopard quickly save the graphics card. Well, that's a HUGE problem because Leopard only gives a User Interface score of 10, yes 10 (using XBench), on this machine with a Rage 128 (it gets over 100 in Tiger with it). Suffice to say, the interface feels like sludge under default Leopard. Yes, getting a 9800 Pro should make it super 'snappy', but I'm trying to bid a good deal since people want like $180 outright for one and I already wasted over $100 on that 9700 Pro that doesn't like my hardware for some reason.

But I ran into an article somewhere that said if you copy over the kexts for the ATI Rage 128 from Tiger to Leopard it will make a big difference. Well, seeing as I have them on separate partitions on the same drive, it was no big deal to copy them over. They were right. The GUI Interface score went from 10 to 40 (4x faster overall; actually faster in some areas than others) with no obvious issues (I guess the DVD player still doesn't work). But it does beg the question of how much of Leopard's 'requirements' are simply a lack of including a couple of megs of Tiger kexts that work perfectly fine straight out of the box in Leopard and make it usable on older hardware. I'm saying they purposely made Tiger slow on older systems. Now 40 <> 100, so Leopard is still slower than Tiger on that same hardware, but 40 is usable and 10 is not, IMO.

The dual 553MHz CPU it originally had was not the biggest cause of a slow-down in performance in Leopard (bypassing the installation check). No, in this case the lack of inclusion of video drivers for the machine's old graphics card was the biggest factor. Leopard runs faster on a dual 553MHz machine with copied kexts from Tiger than it does on the same machine with a 1.8GHz 7448 G4 without those kexts. Way to go Apple! I think those kexts for that card (which was standard Apple hardware back then along with the Nvidia M2) take up a couple of megs at most. They could have easily included them and Leopard would have been 'usable' for stock machines down to 400MHz, I think.

Given the fact even Apple admits (by way of Snow Leopard) that Leopard is horribly unoptimized (there's a reason this machine gets 40 in Leopard and 100+ in Tiger in that user interface score), it all just smacks of unnecessarily leaving older Macs behind, probably more to encourage them to eventually buy a new machine (they don't make much money off older Macs when hardware is their primary money maker) than any technical reason why they couldn't use the newer OS.

And before anyone tells me that Tiger is perfectly usable on older machines and there is no 'need' for Leopard, let me tell you how my Bluetooth headset with an MSI adapter that said it was Mac compatible (and it is...with a catch) doesn't work under Tiger, but DOES work under Leopard because Tiger's headset support is limited to only DLINK adapters whereas Leopard supports a lot more hardware. They couldn't be bothered to add that newer support back into a Tiger update so there's an example of how Tiger is already getting left behind. Apps are already appearing that require Leopard. So sadly, even though Tiger is fast and more stable than Leopard, users still need to upgrade to run some newer software or get support for some newer hardware add-ons, even USB ones. People say supporting PPC in Snow Leopard is not needed, maybe not even desirable (if they think it will benefit their Intel machine), but the same will eventually happen there as well. Snow Leopard only apps will appear and Leopard users will be left in the dust. If you can't run Snow Leopard, you will eventually be left in the dust until you buy a new machine too.

Leopard still has kinks regardless. I simply cannot get the Leopard Firewall to do what it says it can do. It blocks things like Yahoo Messenger and even the Bluetooth File Transfer program in the firewall despite them being added to the app-specific list. So far I've found no way to get them to work properly (Yahoo Messenger will work with the 'behind firewall' setting enabled, but that slows camera performance; Bluetooth file transfers work fine in Tiger but are dead useless in Leopard here).

 

Nice work (although I'm not sure the performance of Leopard will be acceptable on a 600 Mhz G4) but I think the OP has way too much time on his hands.

 

Wow, that's really neat. As far as I know... you're the first person to succeed in doing this in a non WWDC Leopard version (I'm assuming this is not the WWDC).

I have a Beige G3, and a B&W as well (and a 9600, and QS, actually....), so I might try it on the Beige if I ever get my hands on Leopard... probably not though, as I actually greatly prefer Tiger.

Really nice work though. I'd thought that the AGP requirement was an absolute show-stopper.

What version of Leopard?

 

Just based on the screen capture, I'd suggest picking up a 40(minimum)-120(maxumim)gb IDE drive on ebay (or salvaged from something else) and try using Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer your OS to it. I think you'll see a significant speed improvement for almost no cost.

 

I am genuinely impressed. What was the reason/point btw?

 

Availability of kexts

I'm very impressed! I have a B&W G3 with a Sonnet G4 upgrade(500 Mhz).I have a retail Mac OS-X 10.5 DVD; but had given up on installing it. Then I found out about LeopardAssist (to take care of the speed problem when installing Leopard). Michael Brice then referred me to this thread. With your post I realize it might be possible with the appropriate Kexts.
Unfortunately, I don't have WWDC 2006 or a527 or access to them. Is there any chance you could eMail me the required Kexts (other than what's on Xpostfacto)? Email address is: favreta@ieee.org Thanks very much.

Andy

 

Congrats jimjamyaha on being able to successfully install Leopard on both of your Power Mac G3's - I am impressed by your efforts!

 

Didn't Suceed

I was hoping to report success; but I couldn't make it happen. Somehow I managed to mess up my G3 so I can't use it at all. It won't "boot" at all-that is , I can't even get to the Chime.

 

Can you use the kexts from 10.4.11 instead?

Hi James:

Good Work. It is nice to have a way to keep the OS current for these old Macs. This matters if you are using them for some kind of server. When 10.6 comes out I would not be surprised if Apple support for 10.4 drops out. The user experience from using the GUI is of less importance to me.

Question: With a Blue and White "G4" can you just use the kexts from 10.4.11 ? I don't have access to a WWDC 2006 and/or Beta Leopard DVD.

Thanks - Terry O'Leary

 

wow! please help!

Wow! This is great!

I'm trying to install leopard on my "Gigabit" PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz.

I'm getting a similar error, where it says it can't find driver for PowerMac3,3 platform and so won't run the installer.

So it sounds like the problem lies in various extensions. How do I identify them and rectify them?

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

 

I'm trying to install leopard on my "Gigabit" PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz.

I have exactly the same problem and the same machine. If someone can help, it would be great.