power mac g5 question mark and mac logo when startup

It means that your G5 has no operating system installed, or there is no hard drive installed/attached.

You can fix it by reinstalling the OS, but first use Disk Utility to check to make sure that the hard drive is okay. Do you have the original restore media CDs or a copy of OS X Leopard?

 

Snow Leopard is Intel only. You have a G5, which is PowerPC. The latest Mac OS you can install is 10.5 Leopard. I might go with Tiger (10.4). It will probably run the fastest, although Leopard can run more modern software.

 

You can't boot into anything, because you literally have nothing on your hard drive. Don't bother with OpenFirmware. The best luck you will have with operating systems is either 10.4 Tiger (here), which is a very good deal, or 10.5 Leopard (here). If you want speed, go with 10.4 Tiger. If you want more compatibility and more modern software, go with 10.5 Leopard. There is always Linux, however, if you don't feel like spending any money. I would suggest going with something like Lubuntu 12.04, or a version of Ubuntu. You could also try MintPPC, Debian, or YellowDog. But Linux won't give you as much of a 'bang' as OS X. Don't expect it to be the best of the best, because, for more money, OS X could do a better job, but Linux is your friend if you don't want to spend money.
Good luck!
-jrsx

 

That's twice now you've commented on Leopard/Tiger and speed, so I have to call you out on it!

(BTW, I'm just messing with you, not serious)

But, kidding aside, if you have at least 1GB of ram and you turn off Leopard's unnecessary eye candy, Leopard is just as fast as Tiger and even in it's stock form it's much more stable. I had far more problems with Tiger than I ever did with Leopard. I'd roll back to Panther on a G5 before I would Tiger as Panther was just like Leopard in being solid. Tiger is fast, I will grant you that. But my personal experience with it has been horrible.

 

On a G5, Leopard is nearly always faster than Tiger. On most 1.3Ghz+ G4's as well.

 

It's strange to see different people's opinions of Leopard on a G4. A lot of people I've seen say Leopard has awful performance and Tiger is much faster and better, and some say Tiger is too faulty, slow, and obsolete.

cheekin99: to get Linux, I would suggest here. These are all PowerPC downloads. Just burn them onto a DVD, and hold down the 'C' key right after you here the startup chime on your Power Mac. That will bring you to a black screen with some white writing. Just hit enter, and that will boot into the desktop, and click on "Install Ubuntu", or "Install Lubuntu". Follow the prompts, and in half an hour or so, You will be running at full speed! I would suggest you download Ubuntu 12.04 or Lubuntu 13.10. As for wifi, it won't work out of the box. Then, Google is your friend.
Good luck!
-jrsx

 

I'm running 10.5.8 on a G4/450 AGP at work with 256mb ram at the moment.

I've had it on a TiBook 400 before and it's on my G4 Quicksilver right now that I'm typing this on. Works fine in all aspects.

 

It runs rather well with that amount. Even on an Apple TV 1 and it's 1Ghz Intell CPU.

 

Well, it had about 1GB when I initially installed Leopard. And up until a month or so ago it had 1.75GB. I just needed to swap the ram around somewhere else because it's not being used as a main graphic design machine now.

It's heaviest dutys at the moment is running Chicken of the VNC so I can see the desktop of the G4 sitting right next to it (that one is a 350 PCI running Tiger and is our Applescript server).

 

I thought even Tiger needed 512 megs...
I just don't know enough

 

Tiger runs just fine with only 128MB. It'll even boot to the desktop with as little as 64MB, but it won't really be usable.

 

Wow..

 

Heck, even Windows 7 will boot with 96MB of ram. Completely unusable, but it boots.

 

Yeah, the G4/350 PCI is running Tiger with 192MB ram. All it does is process photos automagically and move files around whenever applescripts get triggered.

 

Well...

...Anti-X will boot just fine with 96 MB of RAM on a 266 Mhz PII and be somewhat useful, totally useful with 128 MB of RAM. But this is not a Intel or Linux forum, though I present to you tabbed browsing in Iceweasel with 128 Megs:

http://doom3d.uw.hu/html/linux.data/pic.linux/iceweasel_128.png

Just sayin we pay a high price for Apple eye candy and "services"....

 

I like candy!

 

Sure! That will work. MintPPC is probably the most lightweight Linux distro for PPC.

 

No problem. Good luck!