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PowerBook g4 (aluminium)

After a bit of Google'ing around, it appears that I need to install Homebrew and build fastfetch myself. I have lots of experience with Homebrew, MacPorts and DarwinPorts and so by itself, this is not an issue.

What I AM a little concerned about is whether Homebrew is still fully supported/operational on Leopard and Sorbet... these are old systems.

Can anyone comment on the relative safety of installing HomeBrew from within Sorbet? I would HATE to bork the finely nuanced system I have running there so beautifully now!

p.s.> Alternatively, is there a place where I could download a pre built binary of FastFetch? Thanks!
 
eyoungren said:
You said the second quote above. Post #11.

It's not native. Yes, the unreleased beta of SL can run on PowerPC. But there's no update after that that can run on PowerPC, unless you're using the project that's been posted here. And even then, you're limited to that specific version. No 10.6.8 for PowerPC Macs.

The beta can run natively - but since the official release was Intel only then the official release of Snow Leopard cannot run on PowerPC and is therefore not the last native release.
Click to expand...

You still miss the point. I never said anything about “release” either. I said that 10.6 is the last macOS to run natively on powerpc, and it is a factually correct statement, trivially verifiable. There was no claim about official releases :)
 
barracuda156 said:
You still miss the point. I never said anything about “release” either. I said that 10.6 is the last macOS to run natively on powerpc, and it is a factually correct statement, trivially verifiable. There was no claim about official releases :)
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Then you and I have a disagreement about the definition of 'run natively' in regards to OS. To me, an OS has to be an official release to be counted as native. And 10.6 was not officially released for PowerPC.

It's misleading to call it otherwise, because when we say that SL runs natively, people will think that they can simply install Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on any old PowerPC Mac. And of course, with the exception of the beta and the project on MacRumors, that's just not true. Only those are factually correct and trivially verifiable.
 
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eyoungren said:
Then you and I have a disagreement about the definition of 'run natively' in regards to OS. To me, an OS has to be an official release to be counted as native. And 10.6 was not officially released for PowerPC.

It's misleading to call it otherwise, because when we say that SL runs natively, people will think that they can simply install Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on any old PowerPC Mac. And of course, with the exception of the beta and the project on MacRumors, that's just not true. Only those are factually correct and trivially verifiable.
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Wow! That is one IMPRESSIVE setup! I clicked the "displays" link in your signature. And 56 GB of RAM along with 15 TB! WOW! What do you do with all that "firepower"?
 
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mac57mac57 said:
What I AM a little concerned about is whether Homebrew is still fully supported/operational on Leopard and Sorbet... these are old systems.
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Ah, yeah, about this. Forget Homebrew, it is broken. Unless, of course, you plan to build a modern Ruby from source and then add support for powerpc and 10.5 and all related fixes into Homebrew sources.

The only working and tested option is MacPorts. Possibly, pkgsrc may work as well, but it is unlikely to have many ports fixed for ppc.
 
barracuda156 said:
Ah, yeah, about this. Forget Homebrew, it is broken. Unless, of course, you plan to build a modern Ruby from source and then add support for powerpc and 10.5 and all related fixes into Homebrew sources.

The only working and tested option is MacPorts. Possibly, pkgsrc may work as well, but it is unlikely to have many ports fixed for ppc.
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I have been using Tigerbrew on one of my machines, and I'm quite happy with it. (It also works on Leopard.)
 
Thanks guys. I run MacPorts on my MacStudio and am quite happy with it, so I am leaning in that direction.

In general, do both MacPorts and Tiger Brew have lots of ports in them? Can you run both MacPorts and Tiger Brew on the same machines? Is one of these two generally more recommended than the other?
 
mac57mac57 said:
Thanks guys. I run MacPorts on my MacStudio and am quite happy with it, so I am leaning in that direction.

In general, do both MacPorts and Tiger Brew have lots of ports in them? Can you run both MacPorts and Tiger Brew on the same machines? Is one of these two generally more recommended than the other?
Click to expand...
As far as I can see, Tigerbrew is managed by a single person, making it a much smaller project with fewer packages. However, all packages are guaranteed to work on Tiger. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Tigerbrew has many precompiled binaries, which it prefers over compiling everything from source. Installing Git and dependencies was relatively fast on a 500 MHz G4. The packages do install in different directories, but I'm not sure if they play nicely with each other; it's quite possible that some things may conflict.

I quite like Tigerbrew and use it on one machine (Tiger), while I use MacPorts on another (Leopard). However, I can't say I'm much of a power user when it comes to Mac OS X, as I mainly use Linux-based operating systems in my day-to-day life. Therefore, it's possible that Tigerbrew is lacking compared to MacPorts.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
Thanks guys. I run MacPorts on my MacStudio and am quite happy with it, so I am leaning in that direction.

In general, do both MacPorts and Tiger Brew have lots of ports in them? Can you run both MacPorts and Tiger Brew on the same machines? Is one of these two generally more recommended than the other?
Click to expand...

If you plan to use 10.4, MacPorts may not be the best option. (Not that alternatives are stellar, but some choice exists. Here is what pkgsrc has pre-built for Tiger, for example.)

If you use 10.5 or 10.6, I do not think you can get anything remotely as functional as MacPorts, at the moment at least.
 
thewireless said:
The packages do install in different directories, but I'm not sure if they play nicely with each other; it's quite possible that some things may conflict.
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Well, in principle it is possible, just like it is possible to have multiple MacPorts installations on the same machine.

In practice specifically Homebrew may introduce unwanted breakages, since it uses (used?) a system prefix (/usr) for installation, which third-party software may try to use. In that case you can end up with some nasty linking to unwanted libs, header conflicts etc.

For a regular user there should not be any reason to want to do that. (For a developer: we assume you know better what you are doing.)

P. S. If someone really wants to experiment with this, at least make sure to set the right PATH every time. (That will not prevent the issue which I pointed to above though.)

thewireless said:
Therefore, it's possible that Tigerbrew is lacking compared to MacPorts.
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Given that MacPorts has some 10k+ ports building for macOS PowerPC, I think yeah, a bit :p
(Probably much more, this is just what I apparently have installed.)
 
Well... this is one for the record books!

Yesterday, I installed MacPorts on my PowerMac G5 DP 2.3 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM. I installed the latest version of MacPorts for Leopard (2.10 I vaguely recall - not at my machine right now so I can't check). The installation was successful.

At just around 4 PM yesterday, I entered the single command:

sudo port install FastFetch

It is now 11:20 THE NEXT DAY... and it is STILL cranking, 19 hours later! Both CPUs are running at 99% to 100% and presumably did so all night. I have never seen ANYTHING take this long to execute on ANY computer!

It is not stuck... it keeps advancing from one install to another, but some things, like gcc7, take hours per step.

MacPorts may be just a little too much for a humble G5 these days. However, 19 hours in, I will let it keep going as long as it seems to be making progress, however slowly.

I HATE cranking an old machine like this so hard; it's like asking an octogenarian to run the New York Marathon... tough on all those aging parts. I am probably knocking a few years off the remaining useful life of my G5.

Has anyone else here installed ports and had them take this long?
 
mac57mac57 said:
Well... this is one for the record books!

Yesterday, I installed MacPorts on my PowerMac G5 DP 2.3 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM. I installed the latest version of MacPorts for Leopard (2.10 I vaguely recall - not at my machine right now so I can't check). The installation was successful.

At just around 4 PM yesterday, I entered the single command:

sudo port install FastFetch

It is now 11:20 THE NEXT DAY... and it is STILL cranking, 19 hours later! Both CPUs are running at 99% to 100% and presumably did so all night. I have never seen ANYTHING take this long to execute on ANY computer!

It is not stuck... it keeps advancing from one install to another, but some things, like gcc7, take hours per step.

MacPorts may be just a little too much for a humble G5 these days. However, 19 hours in, I will let it keep going as long as it seems to be making progress, however slowly.

I HATE cranking an old machine like this so hard; it's like asking an octogenarian to run the New York Marathon... tough on all those aging parts. I am probably knocking a few years off the remaining useful life of my G5.

Has anyone else here installed ports and had them take this long?
Click to expand...

It needs to build gcc7 and libgcc7 (i.e. build gcc twice). Plus cmake, glib2 and some other stuff.
That is expected to take time.

A build of gcc takes some 4+ hours on G5 Quad (I do not remember about gcc7, but assume it is roughly comparable to a newer ones).

Notice though, you just need to suffer through this once. Old gccs are not being updated every week.

P. S. Latest update of openssl3 also takes forever to build, because it is building unnecessary tests (which takes most of the time). I hope you are past that point already, so advising you how to build with tests disabled is not useful now.
 
Well, it DID finally get past all that, and after about 28 hours, I got a working Midnight Commander out of it. I didn't set out to build mc (I am working to build FastFetch), but I was having so much trouble there, I decided to try something with fewer dependencies first, to establish that MacPorts worked at all!

Eventually, I successfully built Midnight Commander, feh (a lightweight image viewer) and gnumeric (Gnome Officer's spreadsheet). Now I am back to trying to build FastFetch, the program that got me going down this path in the first place.

Simultaneously, I tried building FastFetch on my M1 Max MacStudio. LOTS of build errors there too, but eventually, I got a working FastFetch, Midnight Commander, feh and gnumeric as well
 
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mac57mac57 said:
Well, it DID finally get past all that, and after about 28 hours, I got a working Midnight Commander out of it. I didn't set out to build mc (I am working to build FastFetch), but I was having so much trouble there, I decided to try something with fewer dependencies first, to establish that MacPorts worked at all!

Eventually, I successfully built Midnight Commander, feh (a lightweight image viewer) and gnumeric (Gnome Officer's spreadsheet). Now I am back to trying to build FastFetch, the program that got me going down this path in the first place.

Simultaneously, I tried building FastFetch on my M1 Max MacStudio. LOTS of build errors there too, but eventually, I got a working FastFetch, Midnight Commander, feh and gnumeric as well
Click to expand...

I think feh and gnumeric to run will need xorg-server-legacy too (and removing the system X11), though I am not sure how it works on 10.5.
 
@barracuda156 , thanks - interesting comment on xorg. It was too much information for my last post, but gnumeric starts, presents a blank all white window and then crashes. I run X11R6, vs. the X11 that came with Leopard, but I have tried both - gnumeric stubbornly refuses to do anything but crash irrespective of the X11 I use.

I will look for xorg-server-legacy and install that port as well, if I can. I'll report back what happens.

BTW, the same process on my MacStudio produced a working gnumeric.
 
mac57mac57 said:
@barracuda156 , thanks - interesting comment on xorg. It was too much information for my last post, but gnumeric starts, presents a blank all white window and then crashes. I run X11R6, vs. the X11 that came with Leopard, but I have tried both - gnumeric stubbornly refuses to do anything but crash irrespective of the X11 I use.

I will look for xorg-server-legacy and install that port as well, if I can. I'll report back what happens.

BTW, the same process on my MacStudio produced a working gnumeric.
Click to expand...

Apple removed X11 soon after 10.6, so on new systems there is no conflict.

And yeah, crashes are expected, and I thought that GTK is broken on PowerPC – until I finally decided to sort the mess with X11 versions.
Xorg-server is not flawless, but it works. (Do not try to build +dispatch variant on 10.5, that gonna fail. Go with defaults.)
 
mac57mac57 said:
@barracuda156 , thanks - interesting comment on xorg. It was too much information for my last post, but gnumeric starts, presents a blank all white window and then crashes. I run X11R6, vs. the X11 that came with Leopard, but I have tried both - gnumeric stubbornly refuses to do anything but crash irrespective of the X11 I use.

I will look for xorg-server-legacy and install that port as well, if I can. I'll report back what happens.

BTW, the same process on my MacStudio produced a working gnumeric.
Click to expand...

So did it work out with xorg-server-legacy?
 
Thanks for the follow-up!

Nope, no luck. gnumeric still produces a totally blank white window, the cursor changed to a spinning beachball momentarily, and then it crashes. No impact on anything else, but both gnumeric and X disappear. Likely X crashed.
 
mac57mac57 said:
Thanks for the follow-up!

Nope, no luck. gnumeric still produces a totally blank white window, the cursor changed to a spinning beachball momentarily, and then it crashes. No impact on anything else, but both gnumeric and X disappear. Likely X crashed.
Click to expand...

I see, that sucks. Well, I have no idea re status of X11 and xorg ports on 10.5 at the moment.
At least some related ports were shown to work more or less recently on 10.5 though.

Did you remove Apple X11? If not, then nothing will work correctly, it is expected.

P. S. Obviously, Xquartz should be removed too, if it was installed. I.e. no version of X11 should be present besides MacPorts one.
 
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