Run Mac OS X On Those Old Macs

AllInOne writes: "Despite Apple's claims to the contrary, Mac OS X runs just fine on older Apple hardware. Thanks to the Open Source nature of Apple's underlying Darwin system serveral clueful folks have written kernel extensions that allow "Old World" machines such as the 7300, 7600, 8500 etc to run OS X. They even support G3 & G4 processor upgrades cards as well. The best release (and free as in beer) is by Ryan Rempel. I just installed his Version 2.0b3 of Unsupported UtilityX on my old 8550 with a Newer G3 upgrade card along along with 10.1 and performance is quite respectable." And elsewhere along the OS price/performance front, Cinematique writes: "I was surfing around and came across this useful little tidbit for mac os x users. Apparently, apple included a way to compress the memory-hungry finder window buffer images, but didn't turn it on at the last minute due to a debuging issue. this turns the compression on, thus saving a sh*tload of memory."

Comments

Now why?

[TheMMaster]

Why didn't IBM think of this themselves? This sounds a bit too much like Wintel's ideas of forcing computer upgrades...
this is in no way intended as a troll or flame just an observation

Re:Now why?

[MrBogus]

One big misconception in your post --

PReP was an IBM/Motorola standard established so that they could eat Intel's business desktop market by selling Windows NT and OS/2-based RISC workstations. For a number of reasons, this effort pretty much when nowhere and was dropped by 1996.

The key words being "business" and "Windows". IBM/Moto's marketing efforts were so lame and such a spectacular failure, that it's no wonder that everyone has forgotten this billion dollar initiative, and laid the blame at Apple's feet.

Apple never really gave a clear indication that they were ever going to change thier business model from being a "systems vendor" to a software-only company. They really just wanted to get in early with what was supposed to be (according to IBM/Moto) the commodity CPU of the future and got dragged into the rest of it. (At this point, with Moto in embedded and IBM in big servers and a stangent parts supply, Apple probably sees that using PPC was a gigantic mistake to begin with.)

Furthermore, Apple had neither the marketshare nor the business users to drive the PReP/CHRP pony, so hopefully it's _obvious_ that it wasn't their idea.

There's also was serious problems with the lack of hardware indepedance in MacOS -- the clones had to use Apple-designed boards, and Apple wasn't planning to fix this until Copeland shipped (which it didn't).

Open PPC Hardware failing is Motorola and IBM's fault, not Apple's.

BeOS on 4x 250 MHz PowerPC 604e

[green pizza]

The DayStar Genesis mac clone series was wild! (For those that aren't familar, see this: http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/ and this: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ULTIMATE_MAC/Elvis/inde x.html). Back in the day, it was one hellof machine. Up to four PowerPC 604e CPUs on the CPU card. 16 DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots. Not bad for 1997.

Because Mac OS Classic's multithreading was app-dependant, only "pro" apps such as Photoshop supported the additional CPUs. But when they did, whoa, did that thing ever haul.

But it was on the PowerMac version of BeOS that the DayStar really shined. The coolest thing was the CPU meter app in BeOS. You could click on and click off CPUs at will. Turn off two CPUs and watch the load on the other two increase. Click off all four, and poof, the OS halted! (they later fixed that "feature").

Anyway.... yeah, the old DayStar Genesis was awesome.

Olde Macs & MacOS X

[maggard]

One thing dampening all of this is that old Macs don't drop in price nearly as fast as Wintel boxes. Three and four year old Mac hardware (which is what is being talked about) still costs a lot more then 3 and 4 year old Wintel hardware. Indeed with a new entry level iMac costing $799 it's usually not worth retrofitting a whole new Mac from scratch.

Are these adaptions useful? Sure, particularly for those with a significent investment in an existing Mac. If one's box is already tricked out, running well and has the oomph to run MacOS X 10.1 properly then this is a great thing. But for folks thinking "heeey, I'll just pick up an old junker Mac and cobble MacOS X onto it" you're probably not making a good investment of time or money.

Wintel hardware has an optimum lifespan of 24-36 months, 48 months is still ok but you're running into diminishing results. Sure folks still use 5 year old Wintel hardware but rarely as a desktop system and even more rarely do they go out and buy it just to put a new OS onto.

On the other hand lots of Mac folks are perfectly happy running 5 year old Mac hardware and are in no hurry to move on. They paid a premium and got a box that has lasted well and is only now going to be a problem if they want to jump to the new MacOS X. Selling for 10 cents on the dollar isn't how the old Apple hardware market works: There are folks out there still willing to pay serious money for extra PCI slots or built-in SCSI or whatever.

So, if you're looking to play with MacOS X borrow a friend's. Or buy a cheap new box. Or throw Darwin onto your Wintel and play with the underpinnings. But going the buy-an-old-Mac-&-fix-'er-up route isn't really worth it unlesss you've already got one laying around.

Re:Olde Macs & MacOS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up on my urge to buy a Mac just to play with OS X. I couldn't justify it anyway. The hardware is too expensive for anything fast enough. I can (and did) build a nice AMD 1.4GHz Athlon system for well under $1000. For that price, the best I could hope for is a subpar G3 platform implanted in a shoddy CRT monitor. On the PC side it is top end and will run anything I can throw at it.

Apple: I don't WANT a computer built into the monitor. Why don't you release an "iMac-Lite" as a G3 cube for $500? I'd probably snap one of those up to play with as long as it had a minimum of 256MB of ram ($20 these days) and a 20 GB hard drive. Apple still seems to be trying to convince people that ram is still $200 for a 128meg stick.

Re:Another option

[Phroggy]

However there is a problem that can happen here: No matter what, you can't get around the fact that OS X needs a bucketload of memory, and many machine, like my 6400, max out at laughable amounts like 128mb, which is the bare official minimum for OX X.

Not only that, but RAM for certain older Macs is ungodly expensive.

Re:Tempted

[myov]

I'm using X (10.1) on a first-gen G3 (233Mhz with 352MB ram). 10.0 was slow but usable, while 10.1 is great so far.

I found that upgrading the hard drive made a huge difference in performance. I used the original 4GB to test X, and it was slow. I found that it swapped frequently. I now use on a 7200rpm Deskstar drive, and I barely hear the HD work.