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Open-source software currently supported on macOS PowerPC

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
wewishyouhealth said:
I guess I am limited to 10.5.8 after all - 10.6.8 A5 doesn’t boot, instead it displays a gray background with an instruction to turn off my Mac
Click to expand...

Which image did you use and how specifically? Are there any PCIe cards (aside of the GPU) installed?
Did you try booting into boot picker (with Alt pressed)?

It is not impossible that some specific configuration is unsupported, but I had no boot issues on G5 2.3.
Generally safe procedure would be to download the image from the Mac (Windows can screw dmg), clone it to a different partition or drive with Disk Utility with Erase destination checked. Boot with Alt pressed, choose the boot drive.
 
barracuda156 said:
Which image did you use and how specifically? Are there any PCIe cards (aside of the GPU) installed?
Did you try booting into boot picker (with Alt pressed)?

It is not impossible that some specific configuration is unsupported, but I had no boot issues on G5 2.3.
Generally safe procedure would be to download the image from the Mac (Windows can screw dmg), clone it to a different partition or drive with Disk Utility with Erase destination checked. Boot with Alt pressed, choose the boot drive.
Click to expand...
10.6.8_PPC_A5.dmg, there are no additional PCIe cards - it eventually worked after a retry, though I had to use the boot picker as you said - otherwise it would lose video after the boot screen and output garbled audio from the Leopard welcome video - I will see how it works on the next reboot.

So far though, I am trying the solutions you have provided on GitHub on 10.5
 
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wewishyouhealth said:
10.6.8_PPC_A5.dmg, there are no additional PCIe cards - it eventually worked after a retry, though I had to use the boot picker as you said - otherwise it would lose video after the boot screen and output garbled audio from the Leopard welcome video - I will see how it works on the next reboot.

So far though, I am trying the solutions you have provided on GitHub on 10.5
Click to expand...

If you plan to use SDL2 or anything that uses it for video/GUI, install libsdl2-cocoa with +oldapi variant. It doesn’t matter if it was initially installed without it, just run
Code: 
sudo port -v upgrade --enforce-variants libsdl2-cocoa +oldapi
That adds a hack for A5’s GL.
 
barracuda156 said:
If you plan to use SDL2 or anything that uses it for video/GUI, install libsdl2-cocoa with +oldapi variant. It doesn’t matter if it was initially installed without it, just run
Code: 
sudo port -v upgrade --enforce-variants libsdl2-cocoa +oldapi
That adds a hack for A5’s GL.
Click to expand...
Thank you, I will remember that - do you have an example or two of what could use it?
 
wewishyouhealth said:
Indeed, I have also tried this prebuilt from _ppc64 that you mentioned, however, just as the 10.6.8 prebuilt, it crashes on startup, without displaying any bit of UI. And yes, I followed what was said for 10.5.8 on your website
Click to expand...

1. Re ppc64. [Obviously] to have ppc64 apps running you need the whole setup for ppc64, including gcc14 etc. You probably could not have tried that, since it gonna take time to compile everything (my pre-built ports for ppc64 are outdated, and just forcing older versions will not always work, unless you carefully use a time snapshot of ports).
Just pulling something from there and trying to run in ppc32 env won’t work.
Unless someone arranges remote access to a fast G5, ppc64 project is dead for end-users, I have no resources to compile everything. (I will still try to have at least the toolchain working and pre-built.)

2. On 10.6.8 everything should work out-of-the-box (with a few caveats re set-up). Notice, I use qt4-mac-devel on 10.6.8 (unless something does not build with it; a few ports require non-devel qt4-mac explicitly).
Good news is that you can usually switch on the go without recompiling Qt4 ports. I usually do this whenever I want something Qt4-based:
Code: 
sudo port -v -N install qt4-mac-devel
And then compile w/e desired.
 
A new port – pnana, TUI code editor.

pnana.png


pnana2.png


In mlterm:

pnana3.png
 
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Andrew-R said:
I wonder if latest elinks works? In 0.19rc1 there were such lines in NEWS file:

github.com

GitHub - rkd77/elinks: Fork of elinks

Fork of elinks. Contribute to rkd77/elinks development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com


Of course for GUI-driven OS like OSX it sounds silly to use console browser, but if it can download src from too popular github ... I have earlier version from 2024 compiled on Slackware, I can read discussions on github but not tried downloads yet. new build I tried to configure desires libdom/libcss (from Netsurf?)
Click to expand...

Fixed a bug on Leopard, updated the port (elinks-devel at the moment).
 
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Managed to stick gcc 14 into the old Xcode and fix the build of R GUI, but at least in Rosetta it freezes. Updates to patches were minimal. I suspect it is the codegen, and then we are out of luck. Xcode gcc cannot compile it anymore.

The package can be tried from here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/6dhig273nzq5a2p/R-app-1.82_0.darwin_10.ppc.tbz2/file

UPD. The crash happens on `nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:`, and the relevant code has not been touched for years. So looks like it is indeed the codegen.
 
Last edited:
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Nightphase said:
Has anyone here tried compiling chawan?
Click to expand...
Nim is currently broken on Tiger, and needs to be fixed before we can build chawan. I thought it was going to be trivial to fix, but then it started trying to use posix_spawn stuff. If you can help with fixing it, that would be appreciated, I have a lot of other stuff to try to fix (like gtksourceview5) before I circle back and try fixing Nim again.
 
Forest Expertise said:
Nim is currently broken on Tiger, and needs to be fixed before we can build chawan. I thought it was going to be trivial to fix, but then it started trying to use posix_spawn stuff. If you can help with fixing it, that would be appreciated, I have a lot of other stuff to try to fix (like gtksourceview5) before I circle back and try fixing Nim again.
Click to expand...

You could ask in Nim upstream as a question (not a bug report). This is a concrete technical issue, they may advise something.

Someone should try on Leopard. I can’t since the build fails on ppc64, and that’s what I exclusively use on 10.5.
 
In the end I made the decision to completely uninstall the official MacPorts and go on with PowerPorts only, both for 10.5 and 10.6 PPC, since almost all ports there are actively maintained and build without issues.
However doing so I broke some apps that rely on specific libraries that appears still not being present (or not fully supported) in PowerPorts:

- phonon (OK in 10.6 while in 10.5 builds but fails during the install/staging final part)

- qt4-mac-sqlite3-plugin (absent both in 10.5 and 10.6)

The ports above are crucial for running QMC2, a nice gui frontend for the MAME emulator I compiled some time ago.

May I kindly ask if it is possible to have those two ports functional? Many many thanks in advance :)
 
SnakeCoils said:
In the end I made the decision to completely uninstall the official MacPorts and go on with PowerPorts only, both for 10.5 and 10.6 PPC, since almost all ports there are actively maintained and build without issues.
However doing so I broke some apps that rely on specific libraries that appears still not being present (or not fully supported) in PowerPorts:

- phonon (OK in 10.6 while in 10.5 builds but fails during the install/staging final part)
Click to expand...

I will try. Not sure I have ever built it on 10.5.

SnakeCoils said:
- qt4-mac-sqlite3-plugin (absent both in 10.5 and 10.6)
Click to expand...

qt4-mac-devel already includes it, so it went unnoticed, I guess. I will look into this.

SnakeCoils said:
The ports above are crucial for running QMC2, a nice gui frontend for the MAME emulator I compiled some time ago.

May I kindly ask if it is possible to have those two ports functional? Many many thanks in advance :)
Click to expand...

Could you say what exactly is broken? (Anyway, I will try first on my end.)
 
srp said:
Your G5 Quad is broken right? What's wrong with it?
Click to expand...

It is not completely dead [yet], I tried to boot it a few days ago and it did boot from the first attempt. However it began falling into KP every several minutes, or go into KP directly on boot from screen with Apple loading, or even fail to boot (no image, just fans go mad).
The first idea was that RAM is failing (I had that once). So I tried to rearrange RAM, removing all sticks but two and changing those two, it did not resolve the problem. The second idea was the drive, since there were some oddities with it (Disk Utility stopped seeing one of the drives). I removed that drive first, then disconnected the other and booted from external one over FireWire. Did not help. I also replaced the GPU from NVidia to ATI, did not help either.
So I have no idea what is failing, but I tried everything I could without some actual repair of hardware, which I have no expertise to conduct.

Obviously, if I need to reboot multiple times every 5–10 minutes to resume building something, with no idea if that works at all on some number of attempts, it becomes practically unusable.
 
barracuda156 said:
It is not completely dead [yet], I tried to boot it a few days ago and it did boot from the first attempt. However it began falling into KP every several minutes, or go into KP directly on boot from screen with Apple loading, or even fail to boot (no image, just fans go mad).
The first idea was that RAM is failing (I had that once). So I tried to rearrange RAM, removing all sticks but two and changing those two, it did not resolve the problem. The second idea was the drive, since there were some oddities with it (Disk Utility stopped seeing one of the drives). I removed that drive first, then disconnected the other and booted from external one over FireWire. Did not help. I also replaced the GPU from NVidia to ATI, did not help either.
So I have no idea what is failing, but I tried everything I could without some actual repair of hardware, which I have no expertise to conduct.

Obviously, if I need to reboot multiple times every 5–10 minutes to resume building something, with no idea if that works at all on some number of attempts, it becomes practically unusable.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a logic board failure or your CPUs are damaged - have you taken the LCS off and inspected the thermal paste/checked for leaks?

I'm assuming your 2.3 DC is your main build device for now?

I have spare LCS parts - a radiator, an extra pump, hose clamps/o-rings.. if a Quad would really provide a big benefit for you compared to a 2.3, I wouldn't be opposed to arranging remote access to my Quad through VNC or similar until you can get yours fixed.
 
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