It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. I learned some lessons. I’m going to make it a lot easier for you to install Linux on your old PPC Macs.
Quite a few people still have Power Mac G5s kicking around, and quite a few people have iMac G3s around as well. That's our guess of what still has the most ground in the PowerPC World. The PPC Archive team ourselves has a variety of machines, ranging from iMac G3s, Blue and Whites, iBooks, PowerBooks, and G5 systems! It is also the last Mac OS X version that supports PowerPC-based applications, as Mac OS X v10.7 'Lion' dropped support for Rosetta. In 2020, 15 years following the announcement to transition to Intel processors, Apple announced a transition of the Macintosh to ARM -based processors developed in-house.
I’ve experimented with Linux and BSD Macs going back to the Mac IIci era, and I’ve never had much luck. Back in the olden days, Linux was a text-based operating system similar to MS-DOS. Everything was handled through the command line in the late 1990s. This time around I wanted to create a “live” flash drive so I could make sure it actually worked before committing to installing Linux on a hard drive.
If only I’d had a blank CD-R or DVD-R, it would have been a lot easier!
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin.
Pick a Distro
Step one is to choose your distribution. After talking with others in our small-but-growing Linux PPC Facebook group, I settled on Lubuntu as a good starting point. Lubuntu is known for having a lighter-weight user interface, LXDE – similar to what Simon Royal used when he put LXLE on an old PC.
Powerpc Applications
Ubuntu Linux has a simple numbering scheme for its versions. Version 14.04 was released in the 4th month of 2014, and 16.04 in the 4th month of 2016. That’s also the latest version available for PowerPC at present. You can download 14.04 and 16.04 from this page, earlier versions from this page, where you can also get version 12.04 for PowerPC, among many other architectures.
PowerPC distros prior to version 12.04 have separate 32-bit and 64-bit installers. The only PowerPC Macs that can use a 64-bit operating system are G5 iMacs and Power Macs. Anything before G5 can only use a 32-bit Linux. Starting with version 12.04 the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are part of the same package for Macs.
I suggest you start by downloading Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) desktop CD, which is designed to be burnt to a CD-R and give you a fully bootable way to test out Linux before you commit to it. That’s fine if you have blank CD-R media or a CD-RW disc, but I haven’t burnt a CD in years and have no blanks at present.
That was also the biggest reason I had problems. Using a USB Flash Drive was an exercise in frustration.
The USB Flash Drive Problem
How to install a progressive web app on mac. I do, however, have a few 8 GB and larger USB flash drives, and there are plenty of instructions online for properly formatting the flash drive and getting the bootable ISO installed. And none of them worked on my Power Mac G5. I would spend hours trying this, that, and the other thing. Formatting the flash drive was the easy part; installing the ISO and creating a bootable system stumped me.
The only method I found that worked for creating a bootable USB flash drive with Lubuntu on it required me to use Etcher, a freeware app that takes an ISO and creates a bootable flash drive from it. However, Etcher doesn’t run on PowerPC Macs. Nor does it run on my Intel Macs with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I had to use one of my Macs with OS X 10.11 El Capitan installed, and that did the job.
In other words, you need a fairly modern Mac to create the bootable flash drive you need to launch Linux on PowerPC Macs.
I formatted the flash drive as FAT, exFAT, HFS+, Apple Partition Map, GUID Partition Map, and Master Boot Record. Etcher dutifully imaged the ISO file to the flash drive. But it wouldn’t boot.
The key is to format the flash drive using Master Boot Record and FAT. Those are not the default settings, so you’ll have to find them in your version of Disk Utility.
But It Won’t Boot
I’ve been a spoiled Mac user since 1986, and if I’d had a CD-R or DVD-R, this would have been easy. Start your Mac, hold down the C key, and it will boot from whatever is in your optical drive. That goes back to the first Macs with built-in CD-ROM drives. It’s easy, but there’s nothing nearly as easy for booting from a USB flash drive.
On most Macs, if you hold down the Option key (marked Opt on some Mac keyboards, Alt on Windows keyboard) at startup, your Mac will present you with all the bootable options on your computer. On my Power Mac G5, the options are OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, 10.4.11 Tiger Server, and 10.5.8 Leopard.
If I’d had an external USB or FireWire drive, it would have shown up as well. But no matter what I did, the USB thumb drive never showed up as an option. I couldn’t boot from it in the traditional way.
Open Firmware
Whatever the reason, my last generation Power Mac G5 will only boot from the flash drive if I startup in Open Firmware. Hold down Cmd, Opt, O, and F at startup and hold them down until text appears on the upper left corner of your display. Your modern Mac be in Open Firmware (OF, as in two of the keys you hold down to boot into it). OF is a low-level operating system with a command line interface, like the Apple II+ at work that was the first computer I used, the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 that I used at home because they fit my low-end budget, and that Zenith Z-151 PC running MS-DOS 3.3 circa 1987.
Launch OF. That can take a while, as OF tests all your system memory every time you launch it. Just hold those 4 keys down until OF tells you to let go of them.
Free movies 2019 app. As long as you only have one bootable USB device, such as the flash drive with Lubuntu or an external CD-ROM or DVD drive, you can type in the following to boot from that device on a dual-core Power Mac G5:
boot ud:,:tbxi
and then hit Return or Enter. That worked perfectly with my Late 2005 Power Mac G5, but it would not work with my older 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5s no matter what I did, and I didn’t bother to try it on an iMac G5.
If you have more than one bootable device, type devalias at the prompt, hit Return, and you will see a lengthy list of devices like this.
That was a bit of a rabbit trail for me. In the end I found the command that let me boot from the front USB port on my older Power Mac G5 – these are all equivalent:
boot usb2/disk@1:2,yaboot
boot usb2/disk:2,yaboot boot usb2/@1:2,yaboot
But that only worked on one of my Power Mac G5s. The other three I tried simply would not boot from the flash drive. This was an exercise in frustration!
Making a Bootable Linux Hard Drive
Once I saw that Lubuntu ran decently on my ancient Power Mac G5 Dual, I knew that I wanted to install it on a hard drive so it would boot more quickly and allow me to add more software. That would have been easy on the Dual, but I didn’t want to reformat either of its hard drives, so I went through my small collection of older Power Mac G5 models in search of one that would boot from the flash drive so I could easily reformat its hard drive and install Lubuntu.
When I finally got one up and running – the third one I tried (the first one wouldn’t even boot, the second wouldn’t boot from the flash drive) – I started the installer. I really appreciate the concise, thorough, helpful explanations of what each choice means. It’s the kind of polish we don’t see with the Mac OS; Apple knows that most of us just want it to run. Ubuntu knows that we are interested in making informed decisions and that it needs to educate us through the process. Nice!
Good reader mac app. Or so it seemed. Then it wanted to upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, but every time I tried to do that, it nattered at me about removing certain files using sudo and compressing other files – neither of which I am able to do. How can I remove 35.6 M of files when I don’t even know what’s necessary?
Okay, I should have just started with the Lubuntu 16.04 ISO, but I didn’t know it at the time. If you want to try Linux on a PowerPC Mac, choose the 16.04 Long Term Release (LTR) version and be done with big upgrades until the next LTR version, probably in April 2018.
If you’re just experimenting, you might want to use Lubuntu 17.04. And if you’re patient, you might want to wait until April when Lubuntu 18.04 LTR is due.
Lesson Learned: Burn a Disc Instead!
I wanted you to understand the frustration of trying to do things with a USB flash drive before telling you to bite the bullet and burn a DVD-R disk with the distro of your choosing. You can burn a CD-R, but that usually means trimming the Linux distro to fit on a disc. With DVD-R you’ve got lots of room for distros approaching 1 GB in size.
And you don’t have to use Open Firmware at all.
Booting from the DVD-R was a breeze after all the frustration I had to deal with creating a bootable flash drive and then actually booting from it. I wiped the 80 GB drive in a 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5 with 3 GB RAM and installed Lubuntu. I ended up with a very nice, friendly, functional Linux machine that lets me run the latest version of Firefox on a 2005 Power Mac that was left behind with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard shipped in August 2009.
Is It Practical?
There are two questions to address here: Is it practical to continue using PowerPC Macs in 2018? And is it practical to run Linux on PowerPC Macs instead of OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard?
HardwareApps For Powerpc Macs Version
For those who have a Power Mac G5 Quad, the last and most powerful PowerPC Mac ever, the answer is a resounding yes. With four cores running at 2.5 GHz, you’ve got comparable power to the earliest 4-core Mac Pro. This is lustworthy hardware, although not especially practical in terms of the current it draws.
Dual-processor and dual-core Power Mac G5s are competent performers, and the faster dual-processor Power Mac G4 machines are solid workhorses as well with decent amounts of power. I wouldn’t want to use a Power Mac below 800 MHz or so with Tiger or Leopard, but dual 733 MHz or faster CPUs work well enough.
There may be tasks where processing power isn’t an issue, perhaps a home file server or web server, and there even a 233 MHz iMac G3 may provide all the power you need. Using MAMP, Tiger and Leopard can be configured as Unix servers.
Operating System
If you’re wed to Mac software, Linux probably isn’t going to be on our daily driver Mac. There is a whole learning curve going to a different operating system and using primarily free open source software that may have the power of commercial apps – but you need to figure out how to access it.
Powerpc Mac Emulator
But if you want to set up a machine with an up-to-date operating system and browser that can be used more like a Chromebook than a Mac, Linux could be for you. Firefox is a staple in the Linux world, and the latest version is fast with a reduced memory footprint. I can run it on my Power Mac G5 Dual nicely. Not as nicely as a 3 GHz Core i3 iMac, but nicely nonetheless.
Honestly, I would go the triple-boot route. Today I put separate Tiger and Leopard partitions on any G4 or G5 Mac I set up, usually with Leopard getting 2-3 times as much space as Tiger, depending on the size of the hard drive. To learn to live in the Linux world, I would go with two hard drives when possible – one just for Linux, which likes to partition its hard drive just so – and one with partitions for Tiger and Leopard.
Facebook: OuchApps For Powerpc Macs Emulator
Facebook is a remarkably bloated environment, and you’ve probably been spoiled with modern hardware or the mobile version. Even on my dual-core 2.3 GHz G5, Facebook is frustratingly slow. You can really speed it up by going to m.facebook.com instead of www.facebook.com. That puts you in the mobile version, which has its own drawbacks but runs a lot faster than the desktop version.
Conclusion
Don’t try to do it on your own. We’ve created a helpful Facebook group of people who have managed to get Linux running on PowerPC hardware and those who are learning how. Linux on PowerPC Macs was invaluable in helping me get this far.
keywords: #ppclinux #linuxonmac
short link: https://goo.gl/anff6h
Nearly a decade has has passed since the last run of PowerPC Macs hit Apple’s store shelves and provided us with one last hurrah on “thinking different” and being part of the trope of “crazy ones” who simply would not conform to the norm.
The Think Different campaign meant a lot to those who hold Apple near and dear and balked changing things just to fit in. The fact that Macs had run PowerPC processors versus Intel or AMD CPUs for so long kept a true point of difference and made Macs unique and unable to run Windows natively (emulation only).
As fate would have it though, just as unthinkable as it was for Steve Jobs to help bring improved versions of Microsoft Office to the Mac shortly after his return and accept an investment of $150 Million from the corporate giant out of Redmond (which many Mac die-hards despised for years), Macs would abandon PowerPC processors in favor of Intel.
No longer did it seem that Macs were “thinking different”. At the time it really felt as if Apple had conceded to be more or less like Windows machines, allowing Windows to run natively on the Mac due to the change in architecture.
PowerPC Goes Out with a Bang
The last gasp of notable Macs maintaining the PowerPC chips came around this time or were just discontinued at this time ten years ago, but are still among the favorites for Mac collectors (see key feature below each Mac that sets it apart).
1.42 GHz eMac G4 – discontinued 10/12/2005
Key Feature: Had a 64 MB Radeon 9600 (instead of the Radeon 9200 from the 2004 model), making it the only eMac with Core Image capabilities
17″ and 20″ iMac G5 iSight – introduced 10/12/2005
Key Feature: integrated iSight camera and Iinfrared (IR) receiver, making this the only PowerPC Mac with built-in iSight, hence the “iSight” moniker for this iMac
Power Mac G5 Quad – announced 10/19/2005 and shipped November 2005
Key Feature: Fastest PowerPC Mac ever made and the only PowerPC Mac made (aside from the Daystar Genesis clone) to ship with 4 cores.
Additionally, Apple made 2.0 GHz and 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual models for those who didn’t need quad-core power.
Hi-Res PowerBook G4 – shipped 10/19/2005
Oddly, but perhaps most importantly, the 1.67 GHz Hi-Res PowerBook G4 that shipped out 10/19/2005 – a mere three months before it would be discontinued in favor of the original 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro: 15″ model – A1138 or M9969LL/A and its “big brother” counterpart 17″ model – A1139 or M9970LL/A
Key Feature: Only 15″ PowerBook G4 with combined 3.5mm Optical/Analog audio input/output jack (17″ had this feature on the 1.5 GHz in addition to 1.67 GHz).
Note: The 12″ PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz endured much longer than all the rest of the PowerPC line. It hung around until May 2006, stepping aside with the arrival of the polycarbonate white MacBook) due to the fact that no small form factor MacBook or MacBook Pro was released initially alongside the 15″ MacBook Pro in January 2006.
These Macs were the pinnacle of their lines and still can command a premium on eBay and other secondhand markets. I personally had the pleasure of owning a 15″ Hi-Res PowerBook G4 and still have a 12″ 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 and 1.42 GHz eMac G4 in my collection. All of these Macs are still somewhat viable today as web browsers with TenFourFox, video editing stations with iMovie HD ’06, and could even be decent candidates for MorphOS (a third party operating system that is still currently developed for PowerPC Macs).
The Power Mac G5 Quad was more powerful than most “consumer” Intel Macs (Mac Minis, iMac, MacBooks) from 2006 through 2008, with an average Geekbench 2 score in the 3300 to 3600 range. During this time, only the Mac Pro was technically more powerful on paper, but even then (at least early on), many Mac OS X applications were optimized for PowerPC (and not Intel), giving the G5 Quad a significant advantage.
Tiger or Leopard?
Every single one of these aforementioned Macs that shipped in 2005 came with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installation media and could utilize the 10.4.6 retail installation DVD. Tiger is generally considered the very best version of Mac OS X produced for the PowerPC. It was truly optimized for the PowerPC G4 and G5 in all aspects (even runs great on G3s) and is significantly smoother than Mac OS X 10.3 Panther on systems that support Tiger when provided with ample RAM.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard arrived in 2007, and by that time Intel Macs had displaced all PowerPCs in retail and online outlets (save for clearance and refurbished), but a time of “crossover” existed and allowed both developers and Apple themselves a chance to ween us off of PowerPC gear and PowerPC applications. Apple shipped Leopard on a dual-layer DVD (a first); it was the first and last true “Universal Binary” operating system for PowerPC and Intel Macs.
Note: Although Tiger was also developed for Intel, only Leopard had installation assets for both Intel and PowerPC Macs on the same disc.
At this point, which OS should you run on these late model PowerPC Macs? The short and simple answer: both!
Why?
I could get into a multitude of reasons, but I will keep it down to the two biggest key features that don’t exist on both versions: Classic Mode exists in Tiger only, and Time Machine exists in Leopard only. You can partition your Mac to run both versions of Mac OS X or have multiple boot disks and then boot into Tiger when you want to take advantage of old OS 9 applications that run quite well in Classic Mode and then switch over to Leopard when you want to run a full Time Machine backup (including Tiger partitions/disks).
The key is RAM though – all of these Macs are more than capable of running Leopard and support at least 2 GB of RAM. Make sure you have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM to comfortably run Leopard, but anything more than that is better to allow you more breathing room for multitasking.
Collectible Today
These Macs are becoming sought after for the very reason that they were the pinnacle of their lines and still have limited viability due to the ability to run Leopard rather smoothly.
If you can find one of these machines with original box, manuals, and accessories in excellent to mint condition, hang on tight. They will continue to appreciate and be more and more sought after by collectors. They are true low-end Macs!
Keywords: #lastpowerpcmacs #powermacg5quad #hirespowerbookg4
Short link: http://goo.gl/jquV0P
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