In the previous article, I went over the gist of how I fixed a small problem with my “new” PowerMac G5 – the lack of a boot chime. After a few days of really working with the machine and trying to figure out the reason, I would find out it was really something as simple as the memory being in the wrong slots! By repositioning the memory into matching pairs, rather than just having it crammed in as it was when I got the machine, it happily booted with the chime, and diagnostics showed things were fine – I had a working G5 unit.
Now came the big question: just what would I actually use it for?
Naturally the first though is gaming. Well, that is for me – the Macintosh isn’t thought of as a gaming platform, but really it has its share of good games, and while many of those are available on PC there’s no reason if you already have a machine like the G5 to not at least try them out on the machine.
That wouldn’t be the only thing this machine would be good for, though. While quite out of date, being a PowerPC machine and thus limited to MacOS 10.5.8, this still would be an actual chance for me to really learn the nature of MacOS. I had learned some basic concepts through the years of watching various YouTuber’s videos on their Mac Pro machines and the like, but I had virtually no firsthand experience with the machines – not any that would prove useful experience, anyway.
In fact, my early attempts on figuring out just why the machine wouldn’t chime were in and of themselves a learning experience. I failed to mention in the previous entry in this series that I had also tried various commands in the terminal which adjust the chime sound. These functions are useful for those special situations where the distinctive Apple boot sound might not be welcome, and these commands could be used, with variations, to disable or enable said sound.
In the hopes that it was simply disabled, these were the first things I found and tried. Of course, they had no effect, but they taught me that the terminal in MacOS wasn’t anything different from what I was used to in the time I’ve spent with Linux. I expected as much, but the ease with which the terminal operated was a welcome discovery.
With the help of friend online who has had over the years his own collection of Macintosh systems I was provided not only a good bit of advice on what to do, but also provided me with some useful software for the G5 from his personal PowerPC software collection, including quite a few games that were certainly worth trying out. The fact that Halo is on Macintosh is something I’ll always find funny…
I won’t go into detail on how MacOS operates, and how different it is from Microsoft Windows, here. There is simply far too much to talk about, but I will say I discovered very quickly the general ease of installing software onto the Macintosh, how trivial “uninstalling” some software can be, and the downright magic nature of .dmg files. I wish Windows could be this smooth and straightforward!
It took maybe a good couple of days off and on spent with the G5 to really get to understand the MacOS X operating system and get used to things, but that’s honestly rather fast to learn the gist of an operating system and have it feel “familiar” to you. Really it’s almost cliche to say, but MacOS is pretty straightforward, for the most part…
There are a few things I find very odd about it, both the near-decade old 10.5 that I was learning with, as well as more recent implementations – elements that are core parts of how MacOS X was designed, but past those there really isn’t too much to complain about in actually running some programs and making use of a machine, like the G5, in a realistic sense.
The real problems are in the fact that, as mentioned before, this is an old, obsolete machine. Powerful in its own right, sure – a 2 ghz dual core processor, for that age, is an absolute beast, but software support has fallen to a trickle of hobbyists keeping things going.
The most famous example of the community keeping the PowerPC Macintosh line alive, especially the top of the line G5 systems, would be TenFourFox – a port of Firefox to PowerPC intended to give us a stable, secure, and modern browser for the web. Beyond where web sites (like Facebook) are just too damned bloated to run on anything but a pretty moderate-end system, TenFourFox does fine for almost all web browsing. YouTube is a damn mess, but that’s due to bloat and intentional design changes much like Facebook, and has less to do with the power of the G5 system than you would think.
Then there are websites like G5 Center which focus solely on the Power Mac G5 system. G5 Center has a solid selection of software with some obscure download links archived so a G5 owner can make the most of their machine, as well as ensure it’s operating as best it can be. I quite enjoy the Fast and Slow app, which lets you save a bit of power, heat, and stress on the machine by slowing down the CPU when you really don’t need the speed and ramping it back up when you do – I’ve found it to be useful enough, anyway.
Add in typical Macintosh software fitting for the machine, such as iWork, iLife, and the like, as well as finding 2 more gigabytes of compatible memory for the machine, bringing the total up to 4.5 gigabytes of RAM. After all this effort, I was quite happy with what I had. the G5 is an old, but still capable beast. I figured it would be an odd spot in my collection as the only (functional) Macintosh, but that would very quickly change, as not even a week after getting the G5 I’d be presented with the opportunity to own a few more machines for nothing.
More on that next time, though.