Sorbet Leopard - Your Power Mac Unleashed

[Aggedor]

Installed Sorbet Leopard on my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 (which I upgraded with a 128GB SSD) and have been impressed with how snappy it is.

My machine has an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 128 MB RAM (must have been a custom order, as this model is supposed to have the 64MB RAM card). I installed the ATI graphics drivers (ATI_Rage_Graphics_Drivers.zip), but after that the machine would only boot to a blank blue screen, and rebooting I couldn't even get into the boot manager to select my Tiger partition. I could only fix it by re-installing the machine's old mechanical HDD, setting the startup disk to the Tiger install DVD, then swapping the drives back and erasing the Sorbet Leopard partition so I could start over.

Given Sorbet Leopard seems very fast as it is, I assume for some reason my machine doesn't actually need the graphics drivers install?

 

[z970]

How difficult do you think it would be to bring a modern Webkit engine to Leopard, like MorphOS has? Would it be possible to crowdfund a project like that, maybe convince the Wayfarer developer from MorphOS to build us a new usable JIT-enabled webkit browser? And even have a 64 bit build of it to take advantage of every last resource the G5 has to offer. I would pay for something like that and spread the word.

Unfortunately I cannot provide an itemized answer outlining the development steps required, but assuming AI isn't involved, my understanding is that it would likely require someone with years of professional programming experience to properly tackle it, and even for them it would not be a trivial task. On that note I don't think the Wayfarer developer will be able to do much since the MorphOS platform offers modern libraries and security protocols that current versions of WebKit depend on and Leopard very much lacks.

So without launching some type of grand (crowdfunded?) bounty campaign to attract qualified talent that can pick up where @internetzel left off, UXP is currently our best bet for modern web support. And since it already has actual GPU acceleration--one of WebKit's main strengths--that isn't so bad, especially if we can get the JIT finished and a TenFourFoxBox analogue running to reduce resource use even further on G4 systems. Both of which I believe @Jazzzny was either already working on or had plans for.

And unless it leverages certain G5-specific instructions not present on G4s to accelerate CPU-dependent tasks (similarly to i386 vs x86_64; not sure if it's actually the same case on ppc32 vs ppc64), the only real benefit of a 64-bit build would be it being able to address more than 2 GB of memory at the cost of consuming more memory for every operation, which wouldn't necessarily be a great idea considering the platform since most iMac G5s will only take up to 2 GB total and even a lot of lower end DDR-based Power Macs don't contain much more than that.

For that matter though, I do wonder how much farther back from 10.14 the folks at Kagi could potentially bring a version of Orion if someone threw enough funding at them...

Installed Sorbet Leopard on my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 (which I upgraded with a 128GB SSD) and have been impressed with how snappy it is.

My machine has an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 128 MB RAM (must have been a custom order, as this model is supposed to have the 64MB RAM card). I installed the ATI graphics drivers (ATI_Rage_Graphics_Drivers.zip), but after that the machine would only boot to a blank blue screen, and rebooting I couldn't even get into the boot manager to select my Tiger partition. I could only fix it by re-installing the machine's old mechanical HDD, setting the startup disk to the Tiger install DVD, then swapping the drives back and erasing the Sorbet Leopard partition so I could start over.

Given Sorbet Leopard seems very fast as it is, I assume for some reason my machine doesn't actually need the graphics drivers install?

Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

 

[Appleuser201]

Unfortunately I cannot provide an itemized answer outlining the development steps required, but assuming AI isn't involved, my understanding is that it would likely require someone with years of professional programming experience to properly tackle it, and even for them it would not be a trivial task. On that note I don't think the Wayfarer developer will be able to do much since the MorphOS platform offers modern libraries and security protocols that current versions of WebKit depend on and Leopard very much lacks.

So without launching some type of grand (crowdfunded?) bounty campaign to attract qualified talent that can pick up where @internetzel left off, UXP is currently our best bet for modern web support. And since it already has actual GPU acceleration--one of WebKit's main strengths--that isn't so bad, especially if we can get the JIT finished and a TenFourFoxBox analogue running to reduce resource use even further on G4 systems. Both of which I believe @Jazzzny was either already working on or had plans for.

And unless it leverages certain G5-specific instructions not present on G4s to accelerate CPU-dependent tasks (similarly to i386 vs x86_64; not sure if it's actually the same case on ppc32 vs ppc64), the only real benefit of a 64-bit build would be it being able to address more than 2 GB of memory at the cost of consuming more memory for every operation, which wouldn't necessarily be a great idea considering the platform since most iMac G5s will only take up to 2 GB total and even a lot of lower end DDR-based Power Macs don't contain much more than that.

For that matter though, I do wonder how much farther back from 10.14 the folks at Kagi could potentially bring a version of Orion if someone threw enough funding at them...



Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

Hey, with all the amazing things we've been able to get and bring to this long dead platform in this year alone, I'm definitely not willing to write off any idea. When I suggested PowerFox being brought to Tiger shortly after it was released to Leopard, many people thought it would be a bad idea/extremely difficult. Yet within a few weeks it was shown to be usable on Tiger with a fork called Machfox and soon after that @Jazzzny was able to port it officially with a very nice brushed metal design that looks better than the Leopard version. Same with bringing JIT over, that has been announced by him to be in the next big PowerFox update which will be fantastic.

Yes PowerFox is an exceptional achievement and the best browser we have on this platform, but personally I would want to see another WebKit browser for Leopard too. One that can also play YouTube better than any Mozilla/UXP based browser can.

 

[Aggedor]

Correct, the ATI Rage drivers are only offered for users on for example a G4-upgraded PowerBook G3 Pismo or Power Mac G4 Sawtooth that both originally came with Rage GPUs. All newer systems with Radeon cards do not need the additional drivers and indeed installation of which will break the OS as you've seen. The base system already comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.

Ha, okay, I misread Rage and Radeon. LOL. Thanks 🙂