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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."
The coolest thing about OS X's window compression (off by default) is that is actually *improves* performance, as well as conserving a lot of memory. Because most CPUs are limited by a RAM thruput bottleneck, compression of window data will actually improve performance by transfering far less data to and from the CPU. The compression/decompression routine does indeed consume CPU cycles, but it almost trivial with modern CPUs.
I love simple, free little performance boosts like that.
about how to enable buffer compression, is there anything comparable built into X these days? I'm *not* even close to well-acquainted with the source, so I have no idea.
This seems like something that would work well to help achieve faster GUI performance and lower memory usage under Linux/BSD. Among my friends who've tried both Windows and Linux (mostly using KDE) on semi-older hardware (350-500 mHz boxes), the usual comment I hear is something like "very nice, but the GUI's a bit slower than in Windows...".
I know the GUI "snappiness" gripe is a minor one (hey, I'm posting this from KDE 2.2.1), but the memory usage issue is a big one to me. What sort of mechanisms already exist (or are planned) in X to accomodate this sort of thing?
BTW, to the author of that little hack, VERY NICE
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Even if an older Mac could run OSX fast enough, what about the screen resolution?
I run OSX in both 1600x1024 (my cinema display) and on my widescreen TiBook. It works great.
However, I would think that you would run out of space trying to run it in 640x480 resolution (which are what some older Macs are stuck at).
Would this hack work if used under an "old mac" emulator such as Basilisk II? A cow-orker of mine wants me to try OSX, but I have no Mac, and I don't plan to buy one ever.. Thought that this hack might do the trick
There's one on ebay right now at $400, ending tomorrow.
If Apple weren't a software company, they could just jettison all the expensive MacOS development work and produce translucent, elegant, highly certified and tested x86 machines, and save a bundle.
If Apple were a hardware company, they wouldn't have lost so badly when the clone makers gave Apple's customers what the customers wanted---inexpensive, powerful machines that ran MacOS, without logos, frogdesign, or ad campaigns. Instead, Apple was forced to reconsider what made them competitive, and yanked all the software licenses.
Back in the days of PReP (a joint IBM/Motorola/Apple standard for PowerPC motherboards), Apple stonewalled on support, claiming there were problems getting MacOS to run on PReP hardware---they couldn't get it to work without having Mac ROMs, and there was some problem with *that*, and etc etc etc. A small Swiss software company (I believe called Qix) demonstrated MacOS running on PReP hardware, and IIRC Apple threatened them into little pieces. Later, Apple sorta endorsed CHRP, a successor to PReP, this time with a spot for those all-important Mac ROMs to live. But Apple never shipped MacOS for CHRP; this was the era when Apple was retaking control over hardware that could run MacOS. Of course, all that talk about engineering requirements for Mac ROMs in hardware turned out to be bullshit; the iMac next to me has OpenBoot ROMs, and loads the Mac ROMs from the hard drive.
Apple's work on PReP and then CHRP, and their commitments to supporting MacOS on those platforms led to great hopes for a commodity market in PowerPC motherboards, especially among Linux weenies like me who wanted widely available, appropriately priced non-x86 desktop machines available. Apple's broken promises are a part of why more of you aren't running Linux on non-x86 machines. But hey, at least Apple got to keep their software locked up.
Locked up? Well, maybe that's the wrong concept. Let's think of Apple-branded hardware as a Really Big Dongle, a copy-protection mechanism for MacOS. (The CPU incompatibility also keeps them from looking like they're competing with Microsoft, which makes Microsoft happy.)
Here's a fun experiment. Sit down with the parts list for a modern Mac and compare it to a well-built, well-designed Windows box from a first tier vendor, like Sony. The two machines may even have a lot of identical parts, now that Macs have PC133 memory, PCI, AGP, IDE hard drives, etc. Once you get done, add ~15-20% to the price of the PC to compensate for the generally better quality and design of Macs (if you believe that.)
If you do this across Apple's product line, you'll notice price differences anywhere between $75-100 for iMac-like machines to several hundred dollars on the high end boxes. Part of that margin is what pays for R&D, and in particular, OS development. So in some sense, Apple prices their OS by the capabilities of the hardware it runs on. Microsoft can only dream of this kind of profit maximization through differentiated pricing. Oh, and the license isn't transferable; you end up buying a new MacOS license fee when you buy a new Mac. That's how Windows OEM licenses are supposed to work; there's still a fair amount of piracy of Windows onto beige boxes, but Apple avoids that too.
Anyway, a potentially important reason why Apple hardware retains value is that a significant portion of original hardware cost is actually paying for the MacOS Dongle. Even as the cost of the hardware depreciates, the price of the ability to run MacOS does not depreciate as sharply.
My NeXT Cube (sans Dimension, sadly), serial # 0000000200, is running my NeXT 400dpi and OpenStep 4.2 Patch 4 on the same subnet this IBM Thinkpad is 802.11b'd into.
The Sun SparcStation 20 18G/256 runs OpenStep 4.2 Sparc happily OmniWebbing and NeXT Mail.app-ing into this nascent millenium.
My friends, we who speak netInfo and appreciate Ohlfs have been into and are comfortable with the future that so many so called computer people have yet to experience. I have a 1.4 Athlon Tbird all maxxed out, and it does nothing to inspire the lust and reverence that black hardware and old sun4m with OpenStep can.
OpenSource is definitely where the current energy is. In 1994, that energy was in the NEXTSTEP community. When I wear my 1994 NeXT Expo III t-shirt, I still get a rush.
In all these modern OSes, where is the Services menu?
JoeBob
The Anonymous NEXTSTEP loving SysAdmin