Leopard on PowerMac G4 QS 733MHz with 1.12GB RAM?

[RedCroissant]

I know this might not work, but I was wondering if it was possible for me to clone Leopard from one of my iMac G5s on the PM G4. The reason for this is because there is a issue with it booting. Currently, there is an AppleCare Diagnostics CD in the drive and it is booting from that into OS 9.1. The rest of the HDD however, is untitled and empty and I would like to get OS X on there to see how it runs.

I have the original installation discs that came with OS 9.2.1 and 10.1 and also upgrade discs for Panther. However, I can't get the optical drive to eject anything or even load the original discs on there to reinstall anything.

The other issue is that the superdrive on my iMac G5s don't read DVDs anymore, and my iBook G4 that has a fully working superdrive happens to have a faulty FW port.

Could I boot the PM G4 into TDM and use the iMac G5's ability to read CDs as a way to install the OS?

any ideas?

 

[Volkstaia]

Nope. Your processor has to be at least 867 Mhz to run Leopard. Of course, you could probably hack around it but it'll run badly.

 

[Intell]

You can clone your Leopard installation without any problems.

 

[RedCroissant]

Nope. Your processor has to be at least 867 Mhz to run Leopard. Of course, you could probably hack around it but it'll run badly.

running badly is one thing if it allows me to get to the point where I can use the optical drive and reinstall the more appropriate version of OS X. As of right now, this is not doing what I want.

You can clone your Leopard installation without any problems.

Ok. I understand that I make the clone without any problems, but how do you think the QS will run once I try to boot it into Leopard?

 

[Intell]

Ok. I understand that I make the clone without any problems, but how do you think the QS will run once I try to boot it into Leopard?

With that much ram and that CPU, it'll run well enough to be usable. But without knowing what the video card it, I can't be certain.

 

[RedCroissant]

With that much ram and that CPU, it'll run well enough to be usable. But without knowing what the video card it, I can't be certain.

So it should be usable enough to then reinstall OS X 10.1 and then upgrade to 10.3.? or do you mean usable enough for basic daily tasks like email and basic web? Thanks again by the way!

 

[Intell]

So it should be usable enough to then reinstall OS X 10.1 and then upgrade to 10.3.? or do you mean usable enough for basic daily tasks like email and basic web? Thanks again by the way!

I'd suggest leaving 10.5 on that machine instead of installing 10.1 or 10.3. It'll be faster and more stable then either of the other two.

 

[Goftrey]

So it should be usable enough to then reinstall OS X 10.1 and then upgrade to 10.3.? or do you mean usable enough for basic daily tasks like email and basic web? Thanks again by the way!

It should definitely be 'useable' (relative term) for basic tasks regardless. As Intell said though - Leopard has a lot of eye candy & is a lot more GPU dependent than Tiger & without knowing what video card you have it's hard to say it'd be a fun experience.

 

[RedCroissant]

I'd suggest leaving 10.5 on that machine instead of installing 10.1 or 10.3. It'll be faster and more stable then either of the other two.

Well that's good to know. I do have OS X Tiger 10.4.1(on DVD). Do you know how to convert that DVD .dmg into an image across CDs so that I could try that as well on the PM if Leopard is just not very good?

It should definitely be 'useable' (relative term) for basic tasks regardless. As Intell said though - Leopard has a lot of eye candy & is a lot more GPU dependent than Tiger & without knowing what video card you have it's hard to say it'd be a fun experience.

And honestly, I didn't even take the time to look at it to see what the card was, so it might be terrible. I will keep this thread updated though since it should be done cloning within 4 hours or so.

 

[eyoungren]

I had Leopard on my TiBook/400 with 1GB of ram before I took it apart for the LCD screen (logicboard was funky anyway).

My coworker has been working with Leopard on a PowerMac G4/450 AGP since 2010. 1.5GB and it handled Adobe Creative Suite 4, Office 2008, QuarkXPress 8.x and Acrobat 9 Pro just fine. Ads, building the newspaper, legals and classifieds. That Mac has a ATI Rage 128. At one point it was driving dual monitors with a second ATI Rage 128 in a PCI slot.

Maybe a bit slow, but it got there. Both Macs got Leopard through target disk mode.

 

[RedCroissant]

I had Leopard on my TiBook/400 with 1GB of ram before I took it apart for the LCD screen (logicboard was funky anyway).

My coworker has been working with Leopard on a PowerMac G4/450 AGP since 2010. 1.5GB and it handled Adobe Creative Suite 4, Office 2008, QuarkXPress 8.x and Acrobat 9 Pro just fine. Ads, building the newspaper, legals and classifieds. That Mac has a ATI Rage 128. At one point it was driving dual monitors with a second ATI Rage 128 in a PCI slot.

Maybe a bit slow, but it got there. Both Macs got Leopard through target disk mode.

Thank you for this light at the end of the tunnel scenario. I don't think I will be holding onto the machine(because honestly the imac G5 I have is working just fine at the moment).

Luckily, the same guy that gave me the iMac also gave me the PMG4 with a 19" display, keyboard, mouse, original discs, Apple Pro Speakers, and even the Panther upgrade discs.

He also gave me an "ancient" scanner and an iMac G3 266/333 <--I'm not sure which one yet since I only tested its ability to boot(which it did just fine into OS 8).

 

[MysticCow]

My DA 733 with 1.5 GB of RAM handles Leopard easily. Not as easily as my Dual 1.8 G5, but it's pretty manageable.

 

[RedCroissant]

It should definitely be 'useable' (relative term) for basic tasks regardless. As Intell said though - Leopard has a lot of eye candy & is a lot more GPU dependent than Tiger & without knowing what video card you have it's hard to say it'd be a fun experience.

Well it totally worked!! Ha Ha! it's running Leopard and better than I thought that it would!

Somehow it recognizes the CPU running at 1.2GHz. Um, ok then. That's a nice little speed boost just by installing 10.5.8 on there.

The graphics card by the way is the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32MB VRAM. The 19" monitor it's running is a strange stretched out 1024x768, but as far as I can tell, everything is operational. I'm going to test it's internet connectivity and see how that goes soon.


****Update from PowerMac G4****

The internet works just fine woohoo!!!!

 

[Intell]

The GeForce 2 MX would be the minimum acceptable card for Leopard. It has QuartzExtreme, but no CoreImage. If you want you could upgrade the video card to a CoreImage card, but you'd loose OS 9 hardware video acceleration as well as support for older 10.X versions.