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What To Do With an Old G5 Tower?
lunatic1969 writes "I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around. My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?"
Yellow Dog probably has the best support, but you could always look at the PPC version of Ubuntu.
If you have the model with the PCI-X, rather than the PCI Express bus, then probably the optimum usage is putting it in a recording studio. There are some great rack-mount multi-channel (like 10 in, 10 out) audio interfaces by the likes of M-Audio which use the PCI bus, and have never been updated for PCI Express compatibility, so they won't work in a Mac Pro.
The G5 has plenty of performance for audio work, and plenty of space for internal hard drives or RAID. This would really be the optimum niche for such a machine. For other purposes (file server etc), it sucks too much power and takes up too much space for its usefulness. But for audio work with dedicated hardware, it's perfect.
... and then they built the supercollider.
That Is The Correct Answer.
You can get a nettop for about $200 that will have as much storage. It will be fast enough and be x86 so give you a wide choice of distros and with the correct choice of GPU will do hardware accelerated 1080p. Finally it will be a fraction of the size and consume 20 watts.
You're doing no-one other than your power company a favor by resurrecting the G5 tower.
Debian's PPC port works well, I used it on an iMac G3.
You can rather easily run Debian on the thing with support for all of the non-architecture specific packages that you'd find on an equivalent machine running another architecture; I had quite a few of them around at one point.
That said, you really should strongly consider not running the machine unless you have a very specific use for it; there are many lower powered machines which won't waste as much eneergy and will provide equivalent functionality.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Say what?! One of my older machines is a G5 dual proc, 2.7 Ghz. That's still a VERY respectable clock speed, it's 64 bit and the dual procs means it's still pretty fast. The submitter didn't mention what speed his was (I'm guessing slower) but depending on that, a G5 could very well be a useful machine. It's not like it's an Athlon or something that is both slow, 32 bit and single core.
Since the G5 was designed for performance, it's not exactly a great file server chip though. But it's far from being a "space heater" as you say -- mine gets used every work day. As others have pointed out, either put linux on it, or put an older version of OS X on it. I still have 10.4 on mine because it was the last OS Apple produced that was streamlined for the PPC. However, now that Apple has stopped supporting it, I'll have to break down and put 10.5 on it. On other older machines though I have installed both pbbuttons and gtkpbbuttons which support a lot of of the media keys on the keyboard pretty well.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
We're using a G5 PowerPC tower to run all functions, including 24/7 streaming, of an internet radio station. Tons of modern software for it (including being able to live-stream after a compression and other audio manipulation chain)... I love Linux and use it on many machines for many purposes, but there's no reason to ditch OS X just because the machine is aging.
Seriously? Okay. The OS that probably works best with this machine is --- drum roll -- OS X.
Without hardly thinking about it it'll serve files via AFP and SMB.
Google will tell you how to enable the NFS server on it. (That's right, you don't need OS X Server.)
Streaming video? If there's open source software for Linux to do this, there's a pretty good chance it'll build on OS X too.
Trade it in! Best Buy has an online trade in program where you can get cash or a Best Buy gift card. I got a $200 for mine. You fill out some stuff online, print a pre-paid UPS label, wait about 3 weeks. Same money you'd get from craigslist, none of the emails for interesting trades. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Electronics+Promotions/Online-Trade-In/pcmcat133600050011.c?id=pcmcat133600050011
G5's aren't incredibly slow, but nor are they particularly fast. The clock speed bump over the G4 meant the loss of some performance per cycle, and the amount of heat those things put out is obscene. A reasonably clocked C2D or any Nehalem should be vastly faster than a G5.
I don't think you realize how much electricity a G5 tower sucks up.
Yup, I was going to post the same thing. I was using one as a file server until recently, when it occurred to me to check how much power it was consuming. Christ! For the cost of running that beast a few months, I could have just bought a cheap NAS.
Basically, yah. It's useless, sell it to some sucker, buy a cheap NAS, and move on with your life.
Comment of the year
On the core 2 duo, it takes about 10 minutes for a 3-day run, on the G4 it takes about 3.5 minutes.
Brett
It's about right. From Apple's docs: idle 120W, max 420W for the single-processor 1.6GHz version, idle 140W, max 604W for the dual-processor 2GHz version. The old G5s were power guzzlers. Each CPU could use 100W by itself. They were the reason that Apple laptops were so slow for so long: IBM couldn't produce a decent low-power chip. Even the 'low power' FX variant used up to around 50W - there was no way Apple could fit that in a laptop. Remember that these machines come from the same era as the Prescott P4s, which peaked at 120W per CPU. Two CPUs, a load of support chips, RAM, multiple drives, and so on all added up.
Some of the G5s were water cooled, and all of them came with an impressive case design to maximise air flow.
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