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PPCPorts: the only ports you ever need on a PowerPC
- Thread starter barracuda156
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Just got linked this thread by a friend after remarking about rebuilding VLC as a G5 optimized binary.
I've got a G5 Quad (of...questionable stability, as they all are) as well as an Xserve G4 and G5. I've Potentially also access to some old Intel Mac Pros (of unknown vintage) through an an e-waste recycler. A friend also has some Intel Xserves that I may be able to borrow.
My workshop does not charge me for electricity use and I've 200 Amps at 208 volts (woo, North America) and will (eventually) have access to fiber internet.
Does the project still require some build boxes?
I've got a G5 Quad (of...questionable stability, as they all are) as well as an Xserve G4 and G5. I've Potentially also access to some old Intel Mac Pros (of unknown vintage) through an an e-waste recycler. A friend also has some Intel Xserves that I may be able to borrow.
My workshop does not charge me for electricity use and I've 200 Amps at 208 volts (woo, North America) and will (eventually) have access to fiber internet.
Does the project still require some build boxes?
I spent yesterday trying to do something about VLC to make it work without X11, either via minimal_cocoa or Qt, and so far it does not go amazingly well. I get native windowing but no video output, and with Qt even audio fails.
Will probably spend another day on that and drop it, unless something works. I hate VLC 😅
MPV could be more promising (at least it supports SDL2), but needs fixes to OpenGL part, which is a mess there.
(Just in case, if the question is not about VLC specifically but rather getting the best playback, try QMPlay2[-devel] on G5. On G4 perhaps mplayer-devel from my ports.)
Yeah, that would be very useful. My Quad is about to be dead (replacing all standard parts did not help, so PSU, CPU or motherboard left to blame), and home machine gets expensive with electricity costs – I keep building ports for 10.6 ppc, but anything less essential is discarded.
Besides, here is the backup repo for ports in a case GitHub is not accessible: https://codeberg.org/macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports
(Yesterday I lost access to my account for no reason, and while it has been restored by now, my trust in the service is gone.)
P. S. To be clear, PPCPorts as such do not rely on GitHub directly for anything, archives of packages are self-hosted, and sources are fetched from macos-powerpc by default.
(Yesterday I lost access to my account for no reason, and while it has been restored by now, my trust in the service is gone.)
P. S. To be clear, PPCPorts as such do not rely on GitHub directly for anything, archives of packages are self-hosted, and sources are fetched from macos-powerpc by default.
I have uploaded my custom PPCPorts install which includes approx. 1500 prebuilt ports for PPC OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (32bit only).
mega.nz
Instructions:
Mount the custom install dmg and double click the provided install.command script - enter your user password when prompted and wait till the process is completed. (at least 20 Gigs of harddisk space are required)
If you already have MacPorts installed you might want to consider backing up the /opt directory on your boot drive before proceeding with the install.
If anyone runs into any problems you can post them here and I'll try to help.
10.75 GB file on MEGA
Instructions:
Mount the custom install dmg and double click the provided install.command script - enter your user password when prompted and wait till the process is completed. (at least 20 Gigs of harddisk space are required)
If you already have MacPorts installed you might want to consider backing up the /opt directory on your boot drive before proceeding with the install.
If anyone runs into any problems you can post them here and I'll try to help.
I would love to put something like this together for Tiger. What would I have to do?I have uploaded my custom PPCPorts install which includes approx. 1500 prebuilt ports for PPC OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (32bit only).
10.75 GB file on MEGA
Instructions:
Mount the custom install dmg and double click the provided install.command script - enter your user password when prompted and wait till the process is completed. (at least 20 Gigs of harddisk space are required)
If you already have MacPorts installed you might want to consider backing up the /opt directory on your boot drive before proceeding with the install.
If anyone runs into any problems you can post them here and I'll try to help.
@thedoctor45x @Forest Expertise I suggest you guys add instructions how to use your archives and where to get pem keys. The latter can be committed to the fork of the base, if desired; if you do, please pick a distinct name (your GH handle will perhaps be convenient, but anything will do).
Then anyone can add a couple of lines into conf files, and everything gonna work normally via port install.
(And we can add this to the head post too, otherwise it gets lost in comments.)
Then anyone can add a couple of lines into conf files, and everything gonna work normally via port install.
(And we can add this to the head post too, otherwise it gets lost in comments.)
I actually do have my pem key and instructions attached to the third post in this thread. Adding it to the Github would be great so I don't have to keep copying and pasting it. Thank you.
However, I am still interested in doing what thedoctor45x did, some users probably will find it more easier to install in bulk. It also is good for the future - at some point I am going to run out of data for my current hosting service and I may not pay for more.
Please make a PR to add your key. (Optionally 2–3 lines into sources.conf, see how it is done for R repo there. But this I can handle.)
Interesting. Is a G5 (with Altivec?) build of VLC demonstrably more efficient than the G3 32-bit version, however?
My interest was originally just because Quicktime and Windows Media Player 9.5 were *terrible* at CPU use when playing back an RTSP stream, chewing up nearly 50% of my G5 Quad
VLC meanwhile did it with about 7% usage. Getting VLC to run *even faster* just felt like fun
Will update far2l port soon. Wx GUI still refuses to load (not powerpc-specific, same issue on Catalina), but TUI works fine.
I would greatly appreciate help with getting python314 working on Tiger, now that it has released. I have attached a failed build log. @barracuda156, @glebm - what should I try to get this working?
There is no libproc on 10.4. Whatever uses it should be conditionally excluded (see libuv port or another example, there are many of those).
Thanks for the help. I eventually got python314 to compile with the two attached patches. Is there anything obviously problematic with the patches? If not, I will make a pull request. I am bothered by the tiger-posixmodule-patch - that code exists in python313 and to my knowledge didn't need to be patched.
Glad I am finally able to make some patches that actually work.
In other news, I submitted my pem key in a pull request.
I also built powerpc-port-base in opt/bootstrap, and built curl there. I ran into problems trying to package curl or even rebuild my main opt/local installation, so that project remains on the backburner. The good news is that it built - I think one file had to be copied manually because it was complaining about permissions. Curl (and many dependencies) also built on powerpc-ports 2.11.5 (or 2.11.99 according to some of the logs).
1. Instead of throwing out libproc code, wrap it in macros, please. Otherwise it is unsafe, someone accidentally moves the patch from inside Tiger-specific block and breaks the code for later OS (and that may go unnoticed, since it still compiles).
2. Dropping static assert is not great, but I am not sure we got a better fix ready. Again, I rather see it done conditionally – it is just 2–3 extra lines.
Take a look at these, and I think there was a Trac ticket too.
Remove Tiger workarounds from my ports · macports/macports-ports@d8b38cc
The MacPorts ports tree. Contribute to macports/macports-ports development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
python313: fix build on Tiger and Leopard by glebm · Pull Request #28265 · macports/macports-ports
Description This adds the 2 patches from @kencu, originally posted in https://trac.macports.org/ticket/71206#comment:13, to fix the build on Tiger. To fix the build on Leopard, we simply add -D_DAR...
github.com
Thank you, I will deal with PRs within a day.
There were some changes to port.pkg and port.mpkg after 2.11.0 release, if those do not work, then likely something is broken (it was broken deliberately in upstream, and may still be broken in PPCPorts, since 10.4 was not tested).
If the point is to get it working locally for you, then anything will do. Say, for x86 ports, which I do not distribute to anyone and use mostly for local testing, I occasionally fix dylib paths manually, which does the trick, but is non-reproducible. If you plan to distribute the base for 10.4, it should build reproducibly with no manual intervention, as long as the latter is avoidable, and in this case it is (after all, relevant code can be reverted to its earlier version).
This is good to know that not everything is totally broken LOL
(Thank you for testing, this is actually helpful.)
This sounds very promising. The key question that comes to mind is X11. The stock Leopard and Sorbet Leopard images come with X11 installed. I have read over and over that this original X11 install has to be removed/uninstalled before MacPorts and/or PPCPorts programs (many of which depend on X11 for graphics) will work.
Does your install script deal with this, or do we need to deal with it manually before running your script?
One other question. Is there a list somewhere of all the included ports?
Thanks!
I have uploaded my custom PPCPorts install which includes approx. 1500 prebuilt ports for PPC OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (32bit only).
10.75 GB file on MEGA
Some additional news on this. This archive is for PowerPC Leopard, and yet it will not download using Aquafox 3.0 running on PowerPC Sorbet Leopard. The source site complains that my browser is out of date! I would hope that something this large could be downloaded directly onto the G5 vs. downloading on a modern machine and then transferring it over. This is what I am having to do; it is slower due to having to download and then copy, but...
...the source site, mega.nz, is really fast. The average download speed for the archive was 90 MB/s (megabytes, not megabits!); the whole thing downloaded in just a few minutes. That is impressive for a web site that is as far away as New Zealand; I am on the eastern coast of the USA!
One of the things I truly love about [Mac OS / Mac OS X / macOS] is that you can easily assign icons to any file or folder, including icons that you design yourself. I design icons for things that I feel would benefit from them, and the PPCPorts Archive that @thedoctor45x has released seemed like one of them.
So, below is the fairly simple image I created for the icon:
...and the source image and the resulting icon file (.icns) are attached as a .zip file.
Enjoy!
So, below is the fairly simple image I created for the icon:
...and the source image and the resulting icon file (.icns) are attached as a .zip file.
Enjoy!
I assume something like this should work to wrap each patch in? #if defined(MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_4)1. Instead of throwing out libproc code, wrap it in macros, please. Otherwise it is unsafe, someone accidentally moves the patch from inside Tiger-specific block and breaks the code for later OS (and that may go unnoticed, since it still compiles).
2. Dropping static assert is not great, but I am not sure we got a better fix ready. Again, I rather see it done conditionally – it is just 2–3 extra lines.
Take a look at these, and I think there was a Trac ticket too.
Remove Tiger workarounds from my ports · macports/macports-ports@d8b38cc
The MacPorts ports tree. Contribute to macports/macports-ports development by creating an account on GitHub.May be worth checking if earlier fixes are still present, where relevant, they may not be.
python313: fix build on Tiger and Leopard by glebm · Pull Request #28265 · macports/macports-ports
Description This adds the 2 patches from @kencu, originally posted in https://trac.macports.org/ticket/71206#comment:13, to fix the build on Tiger. To fix the build on Leopard, we simply add -D_DAR...
Thank you, I will deal with PRs within a day.
There were some changes to port.pkg and port.mpkg after 2.11.0 release, if those do not work, then likely something is broken (it was broken deliberately in upstream, and may still be broken in PPCPorts, since 10.4 was not tested).
If the point is to get it working locally for you, then anything will do. Say, for x86 ports, which I do not distribute to anyone and use mostly for local testing, I occasionally fix dylib paths manually, which does the trick, but is non-reproducible. If you plan to distribute the base for 10.4, it should build reproducibly with no manual intervention, as long as the latter is avoidable, and in this case it is (after all, relevant code can be reverted to its earlier version).
This is good to know that not everything is totally broken LOL
(Thank you for testing, this is actually helpful.)
I was pleasantly surprised that basically everything in Macports (and some things in pip) that is supposed to build with python 3.14 built fine even with my patched versions. It's in better shape than python 3.9 on Macports in my experience.
Unfortunate about the port.pkg and port.mpkg. I will try building curl in opt/bootstrap on the other Powerbook with a 2.10.7 compiled from source at some point. Then I can distribute that curl.
I would like to distribute the base at some point, but it is more important to distribute modern curl, imo. That is one of the killer features of PowerPC ports - fetching source by hand is annoying at best. I assume to distribute the base I do sudo port mdmg Macports?
Glad to be of help testing, and hopefully to the users.
P.S. If anyone here buys ebooks from Kobo and you want to read them on your mac, check out kobodl. It even has a functional GUI.