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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.
personally i'd send it to China for "recycling" or just junk it or donate it. you'll get better performance buying a new iMac and virtualizing the G5. File servers are so last decade. just get an external hard drive and connect it to a TV all of which come with USB ports these days and play a long list of media files
I think I speak for all of us here on Slashdot when I say, porn file server running Linux.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/jaunty/release/
A G5 tower is a monstrous waste of electricity with trivial performance in return compared to a modern machine. Its primary use these days is as a space heater.
Unless you just like the look of the G5, I think you'd be better off trying to get a little money for it on craigslist, and then buying/building a cheap x86 machine if you need a server. G5 power consumption is pretty crazy for the performance you get - best case, at idle, you're looking at 140w, but in reality it's much higher.
I've seen ubuntu on numerous triple-boot (os x / linux / windows) macbook pros. that's intel though. I don't know how good the open firmware boot selectors are (as opposed to RebelEFI) nor how good ubuntu drivers are for powerpc. But worth looking into.
I have yet to run into a redhat installation on a mac. (referring to the article tag as such)
I used a PMG5 for quite some time as a backup server (rsync) running OS X 10.4 Works very well for that, had lots of attached storage. FW800 FTW. But that got replaced this spring with a used Mac pro - quad 3.0 can be had on ebay for $1500, was well worth it and a welcome update.
Just keep in mind it's an aging machine. Macs in general tend to continue running well beyond their useful life, in terms of processor speed and ram ceiling. At some point you have to listen to the voice of reason when someone says "it's OLD, time to REPLACE it", when you want to reply "but it still WORKS FINE".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm keeping mine around to run games on, especially old classic games that have stopped working under newer versions of OS X or Intel chips. In addition to that, it might go to my photo studio as a browser and photo editing machine.
Unless you just like the look of the G5 ...
If its being kept around just for the look then gut it and put a PC motherboard inside? From what I heard it may take a little more than a phillips screwdriver to accomplish this.
And my current plans are to strip the case and stick a updated system in.
Recycle the metals and earn some cash toward a some sort of replacement.
Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.x). A group at work still uses a "cluster" of these for Final Cut rendering.
I'm not sure about the Mac Pros, but I know that a lot of hardware support is missing in Linux for the iMacs, including (especially) temperature gauges for fan control.
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.
Wipe the drives, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whatever works.
Then turn it off
Then say 'its the new replacement for timothy and kdawson. They are now new and improved and no longer post stupid shit like a question that should have been asked on some random forum somewhere rather than on a site with a title of 'News for nerds'.
Listen, its not 'help for newbies'. Its not 'your personal place to question people with an actual clue'.
In reality though, just throw it away. You'll spend more in electricity in the next year than if you bought a brand new Atom PC that will whip its ass. G5s are horrible power hogs compared to current chips.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Debian's PPC port works well, I used it on an iMac G3.
(singing): "Put 'im in the bilge and make 'im drink it, Ear-lye in the morning!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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
Sounds like a good use for it would be a LART to use against snobby PC bigots.
Drop it on a certain Anonymous Coward who insists on complaining about the perfectly rational, excellent, and even superior decision made in the past to buy an Apple computer.
I have a dual 2.0GHz (the one with PCI-X instead of PCI-e) that I threw two giant HDDs in and turned it into a file server (time machine backup server) as well as a media center for my PS3 and 360. I rip my movies to that HDD and watch them via the uPnP stuff on my game consoles (when the mood strikes me.) It's great for storing music collections, backups and other fun items. :) Be a digital packrat.
:) Well no more noise than any other tower PC I've had.
I still have Leopard on it, but that's just because it was the last OS I used before I re-purposed it. I could stick ubuntu on it later on, but there's nothing pressing me to do so just yet (I will eventually, I suspect.) It still sits in the cubbyhole of my super-cheap computer desk in my office, and I use the front USB port if I ever need to reboot it or anything (it's got an insane uptime...) heh. I use screen sharing in OSX to connect to it using my Mini or MBP. It serves up itunes to all my Macs (and mp3s/etc to my PS3/360)without any fuss or overly spastic noise.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Some poor sap will buy it for more than it's worth. The mafia might even purchase it as a concrete shoes replacement. The handles make it easier to lug around.
If it's a run-of-the-mill air-cooled model, just sell it. I just sold mine for $200 direct to someone (who I found on here, actually), but on eBay they were going for around $250 when I looked. Put the money toward buying/building a smaller, less power-hungry box if you're looking for something to do server duty. The person who pays your electric bill will thank you.
If, on the other hand, it's one of the liquid-cooled models, keep it and definitely use it for something suggested in this discussion, but make sure you keep good backups-- Eventually it will develop a catastrophic coolant leak which will destroy it, and if you take it to an Apple Store they might just give you a free Mac Pro.
~Philly
OpenBSD will run fine on it, as will Debian.
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.
Then, with the supposed brain-trauma-induced-contrived-question, have someone followup with a negatively charged post about how you shouldn't seek advice from others because Google is clearly superior to the opinions of others. Then be shocked and horrified at the realization that there are mean people on the internet, even dear Slashdot, who are about as constructive monkey feces! I offer my following suggestion to the large, grey, heavy stone like thing: Catapult.
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
I would install Folding@Home on all the hardware I had if it were me in your situation.
I got a reconditioned Dell OptiPlex GX240 for £50 (from http://www.cambridgecomputershop.co.uk/ ) and even though Firefox is a pain in the arse, Ubuntu 10.4 runs more than adequately on it.
My web domain.
That's what I use my old Mac for. Running OSX 10.5, Samba as my server. Clients are a PS2 with Free MC Boot and SMS, as well as a Wii with MPlayerCE. Unfortunately, the PS2 is far superior :(. The Wii is my backup for low-def shows, since it has a 2 TB harddrive attached. SABnzbd is a must. I also have NZBMobile on my Android phone. Never been happier with a weekend project.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Gut it and use the case to build a modern PC, on which you can install Mac OS X by using Prasys' EmpireEFI. Or just install whatever you want. The G5 may be outdated, but the case is still beautiful.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'll pay the shipping.
I hate to say it, but the nature of CPUs has changed so much since the Core architecture that you might want to eBay that box and buy something like an Atom Nettop.
The G5 and P4 were both pretty much the 'end of the line' of the idea that faster=hotter and more power-hungry.
I keep a G4 dualie around for Mac work, but it's basically a space heater. I advise clients to decommission their P4-based systems ASAP. My dual-core Core 2 idles at under 60W, the G4 uses almost 200W and shows a lot less for it.
Seriously, somewhere out there is a young web designer who wants that G5. eBay it. Take the money and buy a modern machine that -is- supported by the latest distros and won't silently cost you $10/month.
I really like the Atom 330/ION combination, you get low-power, dual-core, accelerated video and 2D, and 64-bits of goodness. Sure, it's slower than a G5, but it's enough to saturate a gigabit pipe, or play 1080p h.264 via HDMI, browse, type, serve files or multimedia, etc. You could probably buy three matching ION-based nettops if you tossed the G5.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Guns to NRA members. It's an SAT question. Old Macs can never be disposed of. Stash 'em in the attic, in the cellar, in the closet . . . Macies just cannot part themselves from 'em. I live with a graphic artist, and any time I mention that she should get rid of those old Macs, I face an armed insurrection. Two G4 Towers stuffed away somewhere, and a "7600" (whaddever the fuck that is) in the attic.
It really reminds me of some old geezer talking about his firearms:
"Well, it might not look like much to you youngens', but that was my Granddaddy's shootin' iron . . . shoot the ears off a fly with that, he could. "
"Well, back in 1998, I programmed that Mac in Lingo with Macromedia Director, to create great animations for my thesis work . . . "
I think my next winter project will be to gut them, fill them with Christmas lights, and turn them into audaciously outrageously tacky furniture . . .
Anything, as long as they don't leave the premises is probably ok . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
As much as it cost you (or someone) Back In The Day, it's relatively worthless now. If you need a home server, buy a hackable router or SheevaPlug and go from there. For power, space, cooling, fan noise, you are just wasting your time.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Frankly, you might want to just decommission this machine. Those G5 CPUs and the associated fans draw a lot of power and throw a lot of heat. Replacing my G5 with a Mini (as a file server) produced a negligible drop in performance as a file server (OS X Leopard Server) by using FW800 drives with hardware RAID instead of SATA drives with MacOS X Software RAID. But the temperature in my home office dropped by a couple of degrees once I turned that G5 off. (It tossed an amazing amount of heat, even when it wasn't running full blast.)
The one thing that G5 was -really good at- was ripping CDs, because PowerPC G5's floating point performance is generally a lot faster than Intel's... I'd suspect you'd get similar performance for video and other floating-point intensive operations.
dave
My 9500 is still hard at work, making midis and um... doing... Photoshop 3.5? The 500Mhz G3 processor upgrade really helps with heavy duty tasks like web browsing. Not to mention all of my mission-critical HyperCard stacks!
I don't have direct experience with PPC, but I've had decent results with Fedora on my Intel iMac. The only problem in the very beginning was lack of support from the Nvidia driver for the native screen resolution of the built-in LCD panel. That got fixed later. Apart from the inconvenience of having to keep up with binary Nvidia drivers, it ran like a champ. Used it to get through Doom 3 and Quake 4. Fedora supports PPC, and AFAIK should run on anything that would run OS X.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Wouldn't a G5 be the ultimate in security-by-obscurity? A G5 won't run Intel binaries, and who the hell is going to take the trouble of digging up a PPC compiler? It's the closest you can get, at this level of computing power, to building your own machine with its own binary architecture and microcode/instruction set.
Thermite, definitely thermite. Destroy it and rejoice in the fire!
iburnaga.blogspot.com
GIMMIEGIMMIEGIMMIE! btw, im a 22 year old college student...and my mac is a dual g4 500. I NEED A NEW MAC!
Get those CPU's working and those 5 fans cranking and it makes a pretty attractive space heater.
I know that my Macpro with dual 8800GT's is in a pretty fair matchup against my 5000 btu air conditioner.
music lover since 1969
It is still a very capable machine and can run a currently supported OS (Leopard) as well as accepting a decent amount of RAM. If someone wants to get into Macs, a G5 tower isn't a bad way to do it as it is decently quick and most software is still compatible with PPC. It would give them at least a couple of good years desktop service and that would be far better than relegating it to being a server.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Some Apple fanboi will probably pay a premium for such a relic. I'd sell it and go buy some pancake mix.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
And send it to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As others have pointed out, the G5 is a power sink. If the power bill is of little concern, the box will work well as a media server, cd/dvd ripper, and everything else server. I've found both Debian and Ubuntu to be good matches for previous PPC systems, but at the moment I'm using OSX 10.5 to support a few favored apps for when my wife beats me to the Powerbook.
If you wanted a server that went easy on the electricity, I'd research the delta - if any - between the G5 and a Mac Mini PPC/Intel.
Luke, help me take this mask off
They may be power-hungry (idle power usage is 120-160w depending on the model/year; the later models were more power-efficient) but the G5's had a very impressive memory architecture. That and the G5 processor itself were designed to shovel bucketloads of data, mostly for media. Keep in mind that MacOS resumes from sleep mode very quickly, and power usage in sleep mode is nil. Not great for servers, but great for occasional work with media like photos or video.
Please help metamoderate.
You'd be surprised what an older G5 desktop sells for on the used market. Any software dev that supports PowerPC apps needs testing machines, and dev boxes. Faster PowerPCs like G5s are in demand out there.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Sell it or maybe use the case, they look quite nice. That might take some work to get non-Apple components in it though (I'm not familiar with how they are set up internally). I was in a similar situation with an old P4 Dell. It's just not worth the noise, heat, and power drain for what essentially is a low intensity task. Serving files or even streaming video doesn't take that much power and G5s and P4s are just too inefficient for what you get.
Sell it and get a Mac mini, or some other comparable low cost/efficient computer. Attach some external drives to it and you're done. Alternatively you could buy an Airport Extreme and a USB hub, plug in a few external hard drives and you have a much better and efficient home server.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
So you use it as a stylish space heater? :p
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Wish I had that problem. My main media server/ssh/ftp server/used by my wife daily is an old G4. Still works great for all of those things.
Fish tank
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Gut it, Dremel out most of the front panel, and use it as a stylish designer aluminium box with handy handles, for holding newspapers and magazines.
Eric Baird
I had such a bad experience installing 10.04 on a vanilla Dell laptop I wiped it and went back to 9.04. I don't know what they did to the install process, but the suckage meter was pegging.
Debian should work fine on it. I had the latest debian running on a G4 iMac.
Get two of them and a nice wooden board for the top. Build yourself a desk.
You can even put a computer from this century on top of it.
As in Will it Blend? A V8 is recommended.
Make it into a arcade machine.
At some point you have to listen to the voice of reason when someone says "it's OLD, time to REPLACE it", when you want to reply "but it still WORKS FINE".
No, you don't.
Trying to seek it on craigslist. Find it on craiglook.com if you want one. Great machine, extraneous and non x86.
Yeah, word... Definitely don't trash it. Sell it on Craigslist to some Mac fanatic. There are so many of them, it's amazing how well they hold on to their resale value.
I recently sold a POS 600Mhz G3 ibook that I had bought for my wife (who had always been a Mac person until I bought her one of her very own). It was half the speed, RAM, even color depth than a much newer Dell laptop I had bought for my mother, and yet there was a lot more interest in the Mac. It wouldn't even run a version of Firefox newer than 2.0 because I didn't bother to pay for new versions of OSX every few years.
So I'm still stuck with the Dell laptop... whatever. it makes a great random photo frame viewer and terminal :P
There are actually quite a few PPC machines still in use out there. I am actually using a G4 Mac Mini to type this. True, they are obsolete and not particularly fast. At least the G4 Mac Mini is power-efficient. But, for geeks, these machines can still keep going for several years beyond their usual life-span. I also use a G4 Mac Mini hooked up to a daisy-chain of firewire hard drives for my file-server and it does very well.
Incidentally, I tried Ubuntu on a G4 Mac Mini recently and found it very lacking for a desktop PC. But it would probably be okay for a server.
So I didn't get bugged by stupid PC support questions. Best decision I made.
Apart from divorce of course.
I work with a bunch of G5 dual 2.+ GHz machines. I do large format printing and design for trade shows and crunch huge files. Those machine have kept their usefulness a surprisingly long time.
And I have no idea what all this "wind tunnel" crap is, I work on Gig + files consistently and they are as quiet as a mouse...
There's not an unsubstantial amount of aluminum in that chassis. I'd gut it and take the shell down to the recycling center for a bit of cash before "donating" it.
Seriously - how many pounds is that shell? 20? At about a dollar a pound (?). Scrap it.
I just did a completed listing search on eBay (Australia) and a used G5 will fetch you between $200 - $600...
Never happened. True story.
Yep, I just picked one up for free to replace my (gasp, G4) and it works perfectly well for me in a recording environment with some massive storage space attached to it. Doesn't beat me MBP in terms of performance, DUH, but does some pretty heavy lifting for what I use it for.
Hahaha, I love the Mac and laughed when I read that, lighten up mods.
Trolling is a art,
A lot of people are commenting that it's not worth it to use as a computing device. I'm not sure I completely agree, but lets say for a moment that they're right.
What do you do with that industrial strength case?
That thing is a serious piece of metal. And there's a LOT of it.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Sure, I don't have 4xFSAA enabled, but plays fine for me. Plus: Adobe Illustrator CS; Adobe InDesign CS; Adobe Photoshop CS; Adobe Reader 8; Autodesk Maya; Delicious Library.app; DivX Converter; Final Cut Pro HD.app; Freefall.app; Google Earth.app; Google SketchUp 6; iDVD.app; iPhoto.app; iTunes.app; Logic Pro.app; MATLAB701; Microsoft Office 2004; NoteBook.app; OmniGraffle.app; OmniOutliner.app; QuickTime Broadcaster.app; Remote Desktop.app; Reunion 9.app; Skype.app; Sound Studio; SoundSoap 2.app; Soundtrack.app; TeamSpeex.app; ToonBoomStudio; Transmit.app; Ventrilo.app; VideoGlide; Virtual PC.app; VLC.app... Plus many, many, MANY, others. All run without noticeable performance issues. And if I had more than the 2GB of RAM that's in it, it would be even better. As soon as it needs it, I'll spend the money. If you can see past the "gotta-get-a-newer-machine-because-somebody-out-there-has-something-newer-than-mine" mentality there's no end to the things you can do with an older machine. As soon as my Dual 2.5 ceases to meet my needs It will go into my museum of dead tech with the others. Until then, it will remain my core duty machine. Hell, not too long ago I won a $100 bet with a friend who didn't think I could get my Radius 81/110 (PowerMac 8100 Clone - circa 1995-1996) on the Internet in less than 30 minutes, from a boxed-up state. It took me 15 and that was only because I had to hunt to find a long-assed ethernet cable to reach from the garage to my office. Easy money. So if nothing else, win bets off the naysayers until you can afford a new MacPro tower. Nuff said.
- Que profuturus est maeror causa sententia Caelestis
My favorite use for any G5 has been in the Marine environment as a Geo-Synchronous aquatic stabilizer.
To use simply load any flavor of Linux you prefer, attach one (1) CAT5 securely to the G5 unit and to your MTV (Marine Transportation Vehicle). Place the G5 into a solution of 100% Dihydrogen Monoxide and feed out the CAT5 cable as needed to achieve Geo-Synchronous aquatic stabilization. If however you prefer to use a solution of 96.5% Dihydrogen Monoxide and 3.5% Sodium Chloride then I highly recommend networking a minimum of 100 G5 units securely attached with multiple CAT5 cables or scaled to the size of your MTV.
...a user on Al'Kabor.
http://eqmac.com/forums/index.php
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I'll trade you something for it.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
So this one will be a little less overpowered. Its not green, frugal, or smart to throw it away.
Drive it until the wheels fall off.
I'd play idtche3 games, such as Urban Terror or Tremolous, on it.
G5's are great when you're working on PPC embedded hardware. I've had luck using VMs where full emulation was too slow. I think MS even used G5s for original XBox work, but that's just a rumor.
If you are thinking about this for your home, think about the cost of power. I bet that G5 sucks a lot of AC juice. And most likely this is at the highest tier of your power pricing. In the winter its not so bad because it heats the house, but in the summer if you live in an area where air conditioning is not just nice but an essential then you have to suck that heat out.
Buy one of these atom mother boards like the one of the fanless mini-ATX mother boards, one of the PicoPSU DC-DC ATX power supplies that plugs into the ATX power socket, http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80, and you have a system that would make a nice file server. Add one or two 2 Tb 3.5" drives if you need space or one or two 500 Mb 2.5" drives to save power. This would give you a nice file server that sips the juice. Would probably pay for it self in a year in power savings and it is good for the environment.
I switched my X86_64 desktop for a dual core atom a year ago and love how much cooler it runs. My office is in the attic and does not have air conditioning or a window so heat is a big issue for me. I run Linux on the desktop and do browsing, email, text editing and the performance is acceptable. Sort of like the first dual core 32 bit systems. It is not a gaming system, but I am not a gamer.
Go green, use low power computers and save the environment.
RLH
Geez, that is not a G3 Machine for God's sake. It is a workstation which is still used in production environments.
It is supported via OS X Leopard which the Snow Leopard doesn't share the same name just because Apple couldn't find a new cat name, it is because Snow Leopard was _built on_ OS X Leopard. Just like Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista. Of course, Apple did "security/safari/itunes only updates" but, it was their own choice with lots of iPad/iPhone stuff going on. Also you wouldn't want "snow leopard" pure 64bit OS on it since on G5, "pure 64bit" really means "access more than 4 GB on a single application", not anything else. It is not x86 which had "bonus stuff" coming to that archaic architecture which wins because of popularity. I am telling these "karma suicide" things since if you actually go pure Linux, make sure you pick a 32bit distro as "pure 64bit coolness" may&will mean overhead and slowness.
Unless developer is a complete "trendy type", he/she still supports OS X Leopard/PPC since there is no reason not to. Of course, I speak about "native OS X apps", not Adobe stuff coming with lots of Windows/X86 copy paste code. Look to top 10 downloads in various sites, they are all PPC/X86/Leopard+. Tiger has issues since it doesn't have kernel functionality in some cases, like the VLC (I heard it is about threads).
For the people saying "massive heat", "power". G5 in Workstation configuration, idles 37 degrees celsius. How much does your Intel do? SJobs had very valid points, about future of Apple and how IBM G5 (PPC970) doesn't fit to it... But the "heat", "watt" etc. were all misunderstood, out of context. It doesn't fit to portable future (which was proved right), it happily runs on desktop, _still_ with IBM current AIX 7 (beta, massive specs) included.
I owned a G5 1600, moved to Quad G5 2500 so I can keep on PPC arch for a long time (was proved right not to jump to those early Intels), I also got G4 Mini, there are more Intel Macs in house... I try so hard to get "impressed", like Wow factor, when you as Amiga 500 user, run Amiga 4000 first time... Can't yet... As Apple keeps doing crazy things like using core duo in this age, where i5/i3 exists, for a long time, I am staying. If Developers doesn't support? "My" vendors are real Mac software houses, you know the ones running XCode. They still support and unless a real necessity happens, they will keep supporting.
It would be "fun" to suggest some nerd fantasy, some kind of joke but, really if you come to slashdot asking "what to do" with a 64bit RISC processor which, if it was IBM pSeries, would have current OS.... You get it... Check the websites/irc channels you frequent, someone really did some reality field distortion to you.
You know, nice joke but, someone really tricked him good.
As a person in video/tv (not porn) business, I know the porn types and lots of G5 towers are used in that business, today. It is because, just like any video/dtp/audio business, they don't buy "trendy" stuff, they run hardware as long as it fits to their purposes. In video, it is all about AVID/FCP/Plugins/Disk bandwidth/Card availability. All you care is what spec (720p/1080/web only/3GPP) you will offer your content on.
Audio really gets interesting since Audio types are the last ones to get impressed. All they care is, Pro tools and particular version they are used to run. Similar on professional DTP too.
I keep reading the title trying to figure if he really means G5, not G3 which has a horrible lack of Altivec (like SSE/MMX). Confused really.
I would recycle the motherboard/CPU (with a legitimate company) and be done with it. You'd get a much better performance/watt ratio with a more modern box. Keep the case, RAM (depending on specs; otherwise, recycle), and drives and get a newer mobo/CPU combo. If the HDD is smallish, you can put the OS/apps on it and get another drive for data.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
As a Mac user, he no doubt has a large collection of buttplugs.
Is that still considered funny?
First thing I thought: A barbecue! http://blogs.diariodonordeste.com.br/zonacyber/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/compvelho13.jpg
What a great idea! I think I'll create a new distro specialised for creating home porn server!
I shall call it PornOS. The default desktop wallapper will be leopard skin naugahyde and the default screensaver will be a slideshow of screenshots from Boogie Nights. The keyboard mapping will be optimised for one-handed typing and when you click things with a mouse it'll make "chicka-bow-chicka-bow" type noises.
I shall not rename the admin account. I think 'root' already has that covered.
I wonder if pornos.org is still available...
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
The thing always was an overpriced dog. Yet, it sold, and its merits were totally believed in by the Apple community.
So it should be placed side by side with a couple of similar era Windows machines which sold for about half the price or less. It is not necessary for specifications to be identical in terms of memory and disk space, you just need roughly competitive products from the same era. It should be loaded with benchmark software and Photoshop, and set up for similar tasks.
The lesson of course will be that you could do the same things faster for half the price.
Then visitors can meditate as they watch on a number of questions, the leading one being, how on earth did Apple get away with it for so long? How did people manage to argue that Apple hardware was cheaper than PC hardware if you bought the same functionality? Why on earth was there universal opposition among the Apple people to a move to Intel. And why did they simply roll over and applaud as soon as the move was made?
An alternative suggestion would be, if there are young children around who have never travelled by air, it could be used to introduce them to the authentic sound of a jet taking off, so that when they do finally travel, they will not be alarmed. That noise, you can explain to them, is turbine fans.
Thank you! I have an old 486 that runs NetBSD 5.0. There are spells that are months long that I don't power it up, but when I do, it's debuggerin' time! I use the extreme constraints to refactor code for performance. Just stretch your expectations for execution time by times 5. A C2D is 100 times faster than the Am486DX2, but I like to torture myself until whatever it is I was coding runs no slower than 5 times longer than it originally did on the C2D. This is actually reasonable given the "slow but safe" model for the original draft code - it leaves plenty of room for improvement, and a 20x speed increase is quite possible in many cases - first draft code is never the best. When I finally take my code back to the C2D box, it screams. Old machines might be energy hogs per unit of performance, but any good programmer can use one to tighten code down as long as the code can reasonably be made to run on the old iron. If not, try on slightly newer iron until it at least runs, and then code on whatever oldest hardware you can get your code to run on. Don't stop til it runs reasonably given the hardware it is on.
Yeah, it's not ecologically sensitive, but it'd be a LOT of fun...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The OP said he wanted a file server, not a video editor.
(And I'm sure nobody would want it for video editing either, a quad-core PC can be built for what he'll save in electricity...)
Use it as an ornament or junk it. That's about the two best options.
No sig today...
You could simply use it as a desktop. Linux has grown leaps and leaps and leaps forward and in many ways ahead of the Mac as a desktop, so read on.
KDE SC 4.5 (about to be released in a few days/weeks) is leaps ahead of the Mac OS X 10.5 GUI. The only catch is that it is not minimalistic. If you want minimalism you have to pick Gnome with Gnome DO and set it to act like a docky. Put a Mac OS X wallpaper in place and install a Mac OS X theme. However KDE has focussed on more minimalism since KDE4 without sacrificing features.
There is a KDE application for video editing that is unparalleled: Kdenlive: http://www.kdenlive.org/
It slaughters Sony Vegas in functionality and is free of charge too. It may not be stable enough yet (version 0.7) so it might be a little bit of a bumpy ride at first.
There is also a kick-ass music management application: AmaroK: http://amarok.kde.org/
It is compatible with iPods that are not of the latest generation (USB encryption crap)
KDE SC's default webbrowser is Konqueror, which, since KDE SC 4.5 also has WebKit support.
Google's Chrome is now also runnable on Linux.
If you don't like the Google privacy stuff than search for the Iron browser (they took the Chrome's source code and stripped it from any call home functionality)
For managing photo's, use DigiKam: http://www.digikam.org/
Personal information management: KDE PIM
For personal finance: http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html
Office work isn't Linux' best aspect, so you could install OpenOffice.org. It is however the best Office Suit available for the PPC. It doesn't look all that good if your distro of choice hasn't supplied their own KDE4 integration into it.
Now there are a lot of distributions, so what should you pick?
The best and most stable KDE4 distro I have ever tried is Fedora. The default download option is with Gnone so search for a PPC KDE version. Because Fedora core is not using anything that is even remotely patented, you have to go to the RPMFusion website to add Adobe's Flash, MP3 and QuickTime codecs and whatnot: http://rpmfusion.org/RPM%20Fusion
You can see pick your download here: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/12/
The Problem I am seeing here is that the current version of Fedora is 13 and the latest PPC64 builds are for Fedora 12. This leads to a little outdated software (1 year).
Here be signatures
Remove the fan and fill the unit with concrete. Get more and get some mortar and build a home or garage out of PCs using them as if they are bricks.
I've been using it for years now on an old G3 iMac that's a file server, web server, VNC accessible, runs my BBS (yes, still do that), along with SETI@home and Transmission. I have no problems with OS X and it's my favorite desktop OS, but when it comes to server tasks I prefer Linux -- preferably Debian.
It's a shame that the G5s lacked any true upgrade paths like the G3s and G4s did. The computer I'm writing this on right now came with 1 800mhz G4 CPU; now it has a dual G4 1.8ghz CPU. Still my day to day workhorse. Still getting great life out of a computer from 2002.
So on that note -- I would obviously take it off your hands and put it on my desk :)
Sell it on Craigslist. You'd be amazed at what people are still paying for those hunks of junk.
Sell it to a sucker while it still has resale value. Someone out there would surely like to use it as a Linux desktop. Personally, I just want the CASE. But I imagine even empty G5 cases are still worth some money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More now than ever.
And it's not so much the joke that's funny,rather it's the sputtering, squealing, hands on hips, foot-stomping, outrage that makes it so hilarious.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's more than powerful enough to handle even HD video, and ElGato's EyeTV package does all the work of capturing it for you. If I can use a G4 Mac Mini for that purpose, a G5 should scream.
It is now used by the local Democratic party. I put Inkscape, GIMP, NeoOffice, and Scribus on it so they can use it for creating handouts and such.
photosMy Photostream
I'm in the same boat. I've got a dual 1.8GHz PowerPC G5 that's basically just collecting dust. I'm thinking of installing MangOS or something similar on it.
Bark less. Wag more.
Or you can develop your code on a modern machine (where compile times are much faster) and run it with an account limited to using 1% of the CPU. Or if you really want a slow machine, you can get something cheap based on an AMD Geode or ARM core, and use under 10W for the entire system.
Generally, though, testing your code on old machines makes you optimise for the wrong thing. On a modern machine, you can often get a large performance increase at the cost of a few MB of RAM. On a 486, that means that you're using all of your RAM, so the swapping makes the code slow. On a modern laptop, you're using 1% of your RAM for a 2 or more times speed boost. On a modern machine, offloading work to the GPU can make things faster and use less power. The same with tweaking SSE routines. With a 486, you won't be able to do either.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Listen, there is nothing you could not have fun with thermite, just put half a kilo of it on top of the G5 and take it to the backyard, then wait for the nigth, power it up, run some CPU intensive application and wait for the fireworks.
I'm pretty sure that box cost a heck of a lot of Doll Hairs when you bought it. Send it to me - I'll take it off your hands. I still have a quadra 68000 plugged up. I will give it a good home. :)
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
Learn a 'new' operating system and install OpenBSD/macppc on it.
Support should be outstanding, and you can rest knowing you have one heck of a secure G5.
And, contrary to what most people think, OpenBSD is great for a personal workstation. Just my US$0.02...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You could always grate cheese with it...
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Two words: cheese grater (or is it one word?).
That is the G5's secondary purpose, you know... why else would they design it with all of those little holes?! ;-)
I recently installed Gentoo on my old G5 and wrote a walk-through. Ultimately, it seems most practical to leave OS X on it, and compile Linux software for OS X as needed.
The haters are out this morning:
"... Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL,""
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml :-)
RISC blows CISC away: [skip or walk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing#RISC_design_philosophy
- so much so, that they still bolt it on CISC [with some success]
[Don't bother with the subheading "Diminishing benefits", it's BS, look at IBM's POWER]
RISC vs. CISC:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2000-01/risc/risccisc/
Our G5 x2 2.5 is soon to be a companion to our Xserve x2 1.33 [redundant DNS].
Just add:
Swift Data 200:
http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2490
Inside your Power Mac G5:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1305
"catastrophic coolant leak":
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair_p1.html
~hylas
They just released FreeBSD 8.1with G5 support and with a bootloader that can boot from a ZFS file system. So make it into a power hungry ZFS file server.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
Does anyone think this is worth keeping?
-Tom
What? Nobody's suggesting the good ol' Macquarium?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You do know how much power this thing draws right?
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
You can get Leopard Server with unlimited clients on Ebay for under 150 bucks. Why this instead of Linux? Because Apple will still be supporting it for awhile, and its an easy environment to run. The REAL question about what you should do with this box.... retire it, run Linux on it, or buy 10.5 Server.... depends on how much RAM is already in the machine. IIRC, those boxes would hold up to 32 gigs of memory, but if you've only got, say, one gig installed, it might not be worth your while to buy the memory to bring the machine up to speed. If there's enough RAM, a G5 PowerMac would make a nice server.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I ran an apache webserver +clam av + spamassassin + qmail/squirrelmail on a pentium 233mhz box with 32 mb ram and about 5gig of HD space. That was Sarge, I think. But it ran beautiful for 2-3 years, every day, as a webserver for work. Then the drive seized solid. But? When did they last make 233's? 1995 or so? Pretty good run for it.
K.
I have a sparcstation "pizzabox" I can get myself to part with. I still fire it up now and then, but I dont' really have any use for it.. keep it mostly because I like the design. I have thought of building modern hardware into the case, but it wouldn't be the same.. and the display connector is propietary, so i couldn't use that
Any ideas of what I could do with it?
I bet it can play Crystal Quest with a vengeance!
-- haaz.
This very evening, I am installing a 40GB SSD for boot disk and low-power 1 TB drive for data. Upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 (last that will run on PPC).
This should give the G5 years more life - it's a wonderful, powerful box and my main desktop (though I keep a separate Linux PC for most day-job development).
you had me at #!
One of the beautiful things about pre-intel macs is their great digital signal processing capabilities. Just leave OSX on it, throw on Guitar Rig and Pro tools, and offer remastering to local bands. You could use it as a web server if ya want to...but why do something with it you could do with any old PC? Work with the strengths of the hardware, make it into an uber oscilloscope, plug in firewire pro audio equipment...I had a dual cpu G5 for awhile, and played with every flavour of linux I could find, but none of them worked with the hardware to a satisfactory degree. Many wouldn't even install. I loved playing with Guitar Rig on the thing though....it's a fantastic piece of pro audio kit, and can robustly emulate and interconnect with many more. Good luck playing around.
If your 486 is swapping, your machine is poorly configured. My machine (as mentioned in the grandparent post to this one) has 64MB of RAM. It never swaps. Not all data processing requires the entire data set to be resident in RAM, and even if it did, then the swap penalty means you'll get even better results when you get back to modern hardware. GPU offloading does not make sense in most situations. And since you're trying to push the idea that anything old must go as it is inefficent, then why should I code SSE routines in assembler, when coding in assembler is even older and less efficient than the 486 - and yes, you can get SSE optimizations in medium and high level languages, but you must write your code precisely in a manner that the compiler you use will realize to optimize it with SSE. In fact, I'd say your performance arguments here are making assumptions as to what the code in question does without having so much as one clue to the reality of the situation. Scientific engineering, molecular dynamics, audio/video codecs, number crunching, etc. might do good with these types of optimization but that's a really small subset of all the code that's ever been written.
Your battlecry of "modern, modern, modern!" reminds me of someone's cry of "developers, developers, developers!". I wish I hadn't commented in this discussion, otherwise I would use my moderator points to mod you down for being like those idiots who declare your cell phone obsolete if you've had it for more than 120 days.
And what's the problem with being a liberal? Or is it a problem to be a trendy liberal?
Buying that dell would also cost him 299$... According to the calculations above, he could run his g5 on that money for 2 years straight and it wouldn't be more expensive (and that's without counting the electricity cost of running that new dell for the same time).
A G5 isn't that old and is still pretty powerful. It still has a lot of life left in it. If you can't figure out what to do with a high end workstation from 1 or 2 processor generations ago then you're best bet is to sell it to somebody who does.
If you're not going to sell it, put a more recent version of Mac OS X Server on it that supports the G5 CPU and put it to use for whatever you need it to do.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Thank you for your intelligent and well thought out response. I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Many people have noted that the G5 machines are power hungry. However, in most cases it will take roughly ten times as much electricity to pump the heat out of your office (or house). This makes the pay-back time much shorter for buying a new, more efficient machine unless you live in a cold region.
...and they all moved away from me on the bench.
Now wash your hands.
WTF? If you think it is old give it to me! My most recent computer is a G4 iBook. And as someone else said, install OS X on it. Tiger, though aging is still very servicable and is supported. What is your new computer?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
If memory serves me correctly Ubuntu Hardy Heron is the last Ubuntu distribution that supports the PPC architecture. Not sure if that is helpful at all. I still say that a G5 is a perfectly useful machine. I'm still using a couple of Graphite G4s for various not so processor intensive purposes.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Installing OS X 10.5 on the dual G5 with SSD took only 11 minutes.
With SSD as boot drive, boots from video to login in 18 seconds, still a bit slower than I expected.
you had me at #!
(...) till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said ...
~hylas
vector linux.