If only that much of effort was put by whoever develops “Shuriken” into actually improving software…
Upd. @Certificate of Excellence Ah yeah, here we go. The first idea is to install standard Tiger release
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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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If only that much of effort was put by whoever develops “Shuriken” into actually improving software…
Upd. @Certificate of Excellence Ah yeah, here we go. The first idea is to install standard Tiger release
Today I setup `zsh` version 5.9 with `oh-my-zsh`. Pretty much the default theme with a few helpful plugins (history search, git, common-aliases, extract aliases) and a couple of custom aliases of my own.
Some of the tab completions are helpful to have and certainly speed up my workflow so I'm glad I set it up this evening takes a little longer to start than bash (around 5-7 seconds on my PBG4) but the customization and usability boost is a huge plus for me. oh-my-zsh has a huge ecosystem of plugins so you can do so many things beyond just what I have loaded currently.
Some of the tab completions are helpful to have and certainly speed up my workflow so I'm glad I set it up this evening
takes a little longer to start than bash (around 5-7 seconds on my PBG4) but the customization and usability boost is a huge plus for me. oh-my-zsh has a huge ecosystem of plugins so you can do so many things beyond just what I have loaded currently.
I suspect the Sierra theme honesty. I say this because I had similar instability that borked a Sorbet install - Unresponsive menu bars & dock etc. Not the whacko GUI colors lol that’s a first but borked none the less. I also have Shuriken (no theme) on a Graphite PMg4 that is completely stable and has been for a couple years now, so I don’t think it’s Shuriken’s core. I might cut my losses and reinstall but omit the Sierra theme if I cant figure out what happened … or maybe I’ll spin up Feinix on PPC and give it a try.If only that much of effort was put by whoever develops “Shuriken” into actually improving software…
Upd. @Certificate of Excellence Ah yeah, here we go. The first idea is to install standard Tiger release
I haven’t tried that distro before.
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Niiiiiiiice
LOL I figured out what I had done. Somehow, I had pulled the "enhanced contrast" radio button 100% to the right. When I did that, the entire slider and button disappeared (because of the 100% saturated contrast) leaving me with not much of a clue as to what happened. Another thing that threw me for a loop was initially my first thought was contrast (as I was in sys pref>accessibility and thats exactly what the screen looks like LOL) so I used hot key control-option-apple-8 to "check" which flipped not contrast but black and white vs white on black settings. All that did was switch the whacko colors v1 to v2 but stilll messed up initially confusing and leading me to suspect the theme at that point. While I have experienced repeated GUI crashing of this theme bundled with Sorbet on a a1117 PMG5 specifically, this was not the issue here on this a1047. It was in fact meI suspect the Sierra theme honesty. I say this because I had similar instability that borked a Sorbet install - Unresponsive menu bars & dock etc. Not the whacko GUI colors lol that’s a first but borked none the less.
I also have Shuriken (no theme) on a Graphite PMg4 that is completely stable and has been for a couple years now, so I don’t think it’s Shuriken’s core.
I’ll cut my losses and reinstall but omit the Sierra theme … or maybe I’ll spin up Feinix and give it a try.
Truthfully, I dont use Tiger all that much - my dailys all have either Leopard, Sequoia or MX lol. It took me a minute futzing around with a pbg4 with a vanilla tiger install to realize the slider & radio button was invisble with the contrast maxed out. Oopsie lol Anyways, it's fixed now and I have reinstalled the Sierra theme as I like it very much.
and now on to Sorbet ... and then I think I will see if I can install Fienix. Always been interested with it and Im trying to find a linux distro that is not too futzy and with functioning repositories for PowerPC which is proving difficult.
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Fenix repositories are down for almost a year, I used to use Fenix but for now you're better with another distribution like Sid or use as a base installation to have debian with yabootNiiiiiiiice
LOL I figured out what I had done. Somehow, I had pulled the "enhanced contrast" radio button 100% to the right. When I did that, the entire slider and button disappeared leaving me with not much of a clue as to what happened and leading me to believe it was an issue with the theme. While I have experienced repeated GUI crashing of this theme bundled with Sorbet on a a1117 PMG5 specifically, this was not the issue here. It was me
Anyways, it's fixed now and I have reinstalled the Sierra theme as I like it very much.
View attachment 2594783
and now on to Sorbet ... and then I think I will see if I can install Fienix. Always been interested with it and Im trying to find a linux distro that is not too futzy and with functioning repositories for PowerPC which is proving difficult.
I had PPC64 Debian on it for a year or so but I did not care for the laggy gui. Granted these are 20+ year old macs and I understand that but it seemed like I was not getting accelerated graphics which was not a very good nor usable experience for me.
Oh well, I'll keep looking. Thanks for letting me know about Fenix before I got into it
Can we point Fenix to another repository that would work? (my linux wheelhouse is rudimentary/limited).
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How did you “resurrect” your battery? Did you rebuild it with new cells?
I haven’t seen anyone do that with an A1139 like mine, unfortunately… (Dang prismatic cells!!)
Anyone wants to try PNANA editor?
I made a statically linked binary, it does not need MacPorts/PPCPorts or anything else.
Can be just dropped somewhere and run the there.
Running in iTerm2 (show older versions from official site or use my port), MacTerm or mlterm is preferable, but it works in Apple Terminal as well.
Color themes are selectable from the app (Control+T, pick what you like).
P. S. I used deployment target 10.5, but right now tested only on 10.6. Should work on 10.5 though, I believe.
I made a statically linked binary, it does not need MacPorts/PPCPorts or anything else.
Can be just dropped somewhere and run the there.
Running in iTerm2 (show older versions from official site or use my port), MacTerm or mlterm is preferable, but it works in Apple Terminal as well.
Color themes are selectable from the app (Control+T, pick what you like).
P. S. I used deployment target 10.5, but right now tested only on 10.6. Should work on 10.5 though, I believe.
Today I developed a No-CD patch for Hell's Kitchen: The Game from 2008 since I couldn't find one. I'm still new to reverse engineering but I had quite a bit of fun piecing everything together. It's an universal binary but I only patched the PPC slice. The full patch is 4 bytes, exactly one PPC instruction.
The method(s) I used have not been documented for hi-res PBG4s yet I think. I will write up a new thread shortly.
I Installed Adelie on my a1047 Powermac. Everything seems to be going fine except when I reboot, the A1047 doesn’t see the install in boot picker. It sees the dvd just fine and I am able to see the ssd to format it during install but upon completion, nada. I’m stuck lol.
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Upon closer inspection I think I messed up the hfs+ boot partition so will redo that step in Qterm tomorrow and fingers crossed, with that, a working desktop of supported Adelie on PowerPC
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Upon closer inspection I think I messed up the hfs+ boot partition so will redo that step in Qterm tomorrow and fingers crossed, with that, a working desktop of supported Adelie on PowerPC
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I don't think I've ever gotten Adelie's GRUB to show up in the OF boot picker.
If it's the only system installed on your G5 you can configure OF to load GRUB directly, elsewise I've had success with ofchooser.
If it's the only system installed on your G5 you can configure OF to load GRUB directly, elsewise I've had success with ofchooser.
I have Shuriken and Sorbet on a different SSD on this PMG5 but I’m not quite to the boot picker yet (good to know though as I was going to ask what folks used). I went ahead and re-deleted the drive via QTerminal and then reassigned a small 100mb hfs boot drive (boot/Apple_Bootstrap) and then the rest - around 111.7gb to ext4, write that instruction to the disc and tell the installer to run. I then assign the hfs partition as such to boot and the ext4 as such for the install in the install manager (horizon whatever lol) and about a minute in it tells me the install failed. I’m not sure what Im doing wrong as per what I’ve read, this should work. Anyways dems da breaks
I’ll come back to it with a fresh brain later lol.
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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:PPC/Installation/Bootloader following these instructions has worked for me but you need to manually install Adelie, which tbh I recommend doing anyways given what a goddamn hassle Adelie is.
Looks so awesome and is something I would like to do in the future as well!
I built my first iBook from spare parts, a white 600MHZ that eventually had its own logic board failure among issues with cables for the display. I got it working well again and sold it.
The G4 system I am typing on now was also built with spare parts.
- Digital Audio logic board sourced at a local Apple reseller repair shop (NOS Spare logic board)
- Quicksilver case (NOS spare part)
- Digital audio power supply (NOS spare part)
Despite being a collector of Apple stuff (hell I even own an OG Newton that works well) I have never owned a Powerbook of any kind! When they were new, I couldn't afford them. When I could afford them, I couldn't justify the cost delta between an iBook G4 and a Powerbook.
Every time I peek into buying one, I keep finding units that are clearly former corporate devices (with a hard life) with resellers overcharging for the laptops, for shipping, and ALWAYS sell the charger separately. That combo sets me off, so I have never taken the plunge on one lol.
Temp solution on the G5 to get dual monitors as I do not own an ADC to DVI adapter and refuse to pay Hyper inflated prices for one.
Anything I do on the connected monitor has a (honestly comical) delay as compared to the main 5200, but it is nice to have a 2nd monitor for basic browsing and other activities while watching video and doing other work on the main 5200 screen. I am happy my G3 B&W could lend me its GPU short term!
Dug up an old copy of iSquint and am using the G5 to work on converting / compressing videos for my 5th gen iPod. Could I do this WAY faster on an M4 Pro Mac Mini, sure, but putting a G5 to work for something useful is also a neat feeling!
Anything I do on the connected monitor has a (honestly comical) delay as compared to the main 5200, but it is nice to have a 2nd monitor for basic browsing and other activities while watching video and doing other work on the main 5200 screen. I am happy my G3 B&W could lend me its GPU short term!
Dug up an old copy of iSquint and am using the G5 to work on converting / compressing videos for my 5th gen iPod. Could I do this WAY faster on an M4 Pro Mac Mini, sure, but putting a G5 to work for something useful is also a neat feeling!
Good use. I replaced the rage in my B&W with a flashed Radeon 7000pci a few years back so have nothing better to do with the rage than stick it in one of my pci powermacs for multi monitor support.Temp solution on the G5 to get dual monitors as I do not own an ADC to DVI adapter and refuse to pay Hyper inflated prices for one.
View attachment 2596961
Anything I do on the connected monitor has a (honestly comical) delay as compared to the main 5200, but it is nice to have a 2nd monitor for basic browsing and other activities while watching video and doing other work on the main 5200 screen. I am happy my G3 B&W could lend me its GPU short term!
Dug up an old copy of iSquint and am using the G5 to work on converting / compressing videos for my 5th gen iPod. Could I do this WAY faster on an M4 Pro Mac Mini, sure, but putting a G5 to work for something useful is also a neat feeling!
View attachment 2596964
Life's been pretty busy so for this years PowerPC Challenge, I didn't want anything crazy, so I opted to get my A1047 back in the fire with a couple new 128gb ssds and a triple boot set up with Shuriken, Sorbet and some sort of linux. Shuriken & Sorbet are great. On this machine so far they have been rock solid even with the Sierra theme implemented on both installs. I couldnt be more happy with how they've performed on this box thus far.
10.4.12
10.5.9
Linux has been a pain lol. Comparatively on early Intel stuff, Linux is a breeze but on this PMG5, I effectively failed in getting Adelie up and running - big fat fail on Adelie lol. I was pumped to give adelie a try but will have to come back to it another time. As time is limited, I shifted to Debian which I have used on this particular powermac in the past. The problem is that I could not find a current big endian PPC64 build and the one I had on my NAS from around 2023, for whatever reason I could not get it to connect to any Debian repositories to DL the needed files. Truthfully, I was not a fan of Debian Mate anyways, so to complete my challenge, I pulled out my trusty Lubuntu remix 16.04 DVD and spun that up. It had been a while since I used Remix and while I had no issues installing, I did have issues getting the install to boot. I thought I was going crazy but had forgotten that to run on a G5, the drive has to be in the primary hdd slot1. Haha, Oh well, Im not 45 anymore lol. Brains going to mush evidently. Anyways, Wicknix let me in on the error of my ways, so I swapped the ssd from 2 to 1 and bam, remix fired right up.
I forgot how nice Remix was/is. I mean I have zero issues getting to business with this build even in 2026. The apps I want are still available through package manager, the gui adjusts as I recall and even the old arctic fox on there is zippy and readily connects to all the websites I threw at it.
Fun times
10.4.12
10.5.9
Linux has been a pain lol. Comparatively on early Intel stuff, Linux is a breeze but on this PMG5, I effectively failed in getting Adelie up and running - big fat fail on Adelie lol. I was pumped to give adelie a try but will have to come back to it another time. As time is limited, I shifted to Debian which I have used on this particular powermac in the past. The problem is that I could not find a current big endian PPC64 build and the one I had on my NAS from around 2023, for whatever reason I could not get it to connect to any Debian repositories to DL the needed files. Truthfully, I was not a fan of Debian Mate anyways, so to complete my challenge, I pulled out my trusty Lubuntu remix 16.04 DVD and spun that up. It had been a while since I used Remix and while I had no issues installing, I did have issues getting the install to boot. I thought I was going crazy but had forgotten that to run on a G5, the drive has to be in the primary hdd slot1. Haha, Oh well, Im not 45 anymore lol. Brains going to mush evidently. Anyways, Wicknix let me in on the error of my ways, so I swapped the ssd from 2 to 1 and bam, remix fired right up.
I forgot how nice Remix was/is. I mean I have zero issues getting to business with this build even in 2026. The apps I want are still available through package manager, the gui adjusts as I recall and even the old arctic fox on there is zippy and readily connects to all the websites I threw at it.
Fun times
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Life's been pretty busy so for this years PowerPC Challenge, I didn't want anything crazy, so I opted to get my A1047 back in the fire with a couple new 128gb ssds and a triple boot set up with Shuriken, Sorbet and some sort of linux. Shuriken & Sorbet are great. On this machine so far they have been rock solid even with the Sierra theme implemented on both installs. I couldnt be more happy with how they've performed on this box thus far.
10.4.12
View attachment 2597044
10.5.9
View attachment 2597046
Linux has been a pain lol. Comparatively on early Intel stuff, Linux is a breeze but on this PMG5, I effectively failed in getting Adelie up and running - big fat fail on Adelie lol. I was pumped to give adelie a try but will have to come back to it another time. As time is limited, I shifted to Debian which I have used on this particular powermac in the past. The problem is that I could not find a current big endian PPC64 build and the one I had on my NAS from around 2023, for whatever reason I could not get it to connect to any Debian repositories to DL the needed files. Truthfully, I was not a fan of Debian Mate anyways, so to complete my challenge, I pulled out my trusty Lubuntu remix 16.04 DVD and spun that up. It had been a while since I used Remix and while I had no issues installing, I did have issues getting the install to boot. I thought I was going crazy but had forgotten that to run on a G5, the drive has to be in the primary hdd slot1. Haha, Oh well, Im not 45 anymore lol. Brains going to mush evidently. Anyways, Wicknix let me in on the error of my ways, so I swapped the ssd from 2 to 1 and bam, remix fired right up.
View attachment 2597040
View attachment 2597042
I forgot how nice Remix was/is. I mean I have zero issues getting to business with this build even in 2026. The apps I want are still available through package manager, the gui adjusts as I recall and even the old arctic fox on there is zippy and readily connects to all the websites I threw at it.
Fun times
What’s the issue with finding ppc64 Debian? Their upstream still support even ppc32.
If there is nothing published, we can probably request for it (to make an unofficial build).
I believe you need a special "curated" installation image which can be quite hard to find if you don't know where to look. The latest I could find on the mailing list is: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2025-12-06/
The Debian PowerPC mailing list contains useful information from time to time and can be found here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/
The Debian PowerPC mailing list contains useful information from time to time and can be found here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/
I couldn’t find it LOL
Believe me, I felt dumb as a box of rocks but heck I couldn’t find big Endian PPC64 on the Debian site. PPC64 link on the Debian site walked me to a Little Endian PPC64el only install.FYI, I really liked how Adelie’s site was structured in regards to iso downloads.
Sorry for a bit of thread hijack, but I think my attempt at Bonslack installer guts finally coming together, so I am asking what kind of wired networking hardware people have in their real powermacs? I think lspci nowadays list kernel driver for given device, so if you ran Linux - can you post line from lspci where it says what kind of driver it uses?