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Bringing a PowerMac G4 Back to Life

Jon Buys — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:00:23 +0000

Under my desk is a PowerMac G4, sporting dual 1.42 PowerPC processors and a whopping 512MB of RAM. When I acquired the old boy, it was running Tiger and had files scattered all over its hard drive. It had been used and abused, and desktop support had put it out to pasture. I saw it huddled forlornly in the corner of a co-workers cube, and knew I could put it back to work. All it needed was a little TLC.

Operating System Upgrade

The first thing I did was upgrade the operating system to Leopard. It’s too bad Apple decided to drop PowerPC support with Snow Leopard, but I can understand why it did. The move to Intel chips has been a phenomenal success for Apple, and I don’t think anyone can argue that it was the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, Leopard is pretty close to Snow Leopard. It’s close enough that I’m only missing a couple of features, and it has the same look and feel as a modern Mac. A lot of my favorite apps have dropped support for Tiger, but not too many have dropped support for 10.5 just yet.

Cleaning House

[inline-ad align="right"]The next thing I did was clean house. Opening up the hard drive in Finder was an interesting look into how normal people use a Mac. There were aliases to nothing, a few shared folders, old disk images, and, of all things, Netscape Navigator (hello, what are you doing here?) in the root of the hard drive. People drop files everywhere. There was also an outdated version of Norton AV running…that got the axe pretty quickly. The scattered files reminded me of how neat and clean iOS is when compared with OS X. OS X didn’t seem to mind where the files were as much as I did though.

App Installation

With the filesystem cleaned up and the operating system upgraded, I set about finding my “must have” apps. I created an “Applications” folder in my home folder, and downloaded TextMate, Twitteriffic, OmniGraffle, CyberDuck, Yojimbo, CoRD, and NetNewsWire. I don’t run apps like Yojimbo or Twitteriffic in the same fashion on the G4 as I would on a MacBook. In the interest of saving RAM, I’ve found it best to close any background apps. When I need them, I launch the app, then quit it again when I’m done. The same goes for Mail and Safari, apps I’d normally leave running constantly on a newer machine.

Slow, Middle-Aged Champ

The PowerMac still runs like a champ, but a slower, more middle-aged champ. He’s not the thoroughbred he used to be; it takes a bit longer for some apps to start, and from time to time the dreaded pinwheel pops up for a few seconds, but nothing earth shattering. Unfortunately, there’s still a couple of Windows apps that I need to run, so I keep my Dell laptop on the side to run the latest version of Lotus Notes and VMware VSphere Client. It’s not the perfect setup, and I’ll be upgrading to a MacBook Pro to replace both of them soon, but it’s been fun finding out just how useful the older G4 can be. There’s very little I’m unable to do with it, and I think if I had more RAM, the system would be much, much faster.

The same setup I’ve got now can be had on eBay for less than $200, maybe even with a monitor to go with it. With a good Time Machine backup for peace of mind, and a little patience, a PowerMac G4 can still be a great day-to-day computer.

Jon Rubinstein to Helm Palm

Christopher Ryan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:44:29 +0000

Former Apple VP Jon Rubinstein will be shifting from his role as chairman at Palm to the company’s new CEO. As many Apple fans already know, Rubinstein was a prominent member of Steve Jobs’ core team after his original founding of NeXT in the early ’90s.

Deep Ties With Apple

When Rubinstein moved to Apple at the request of Jobs in 1997, he diligently worked to bring the PowerMac G3 to market and simplify Apple’s product line in order to help turn the company around. His first big project was the creation of the iMac where he was responsible for some of its signature features, including USB peripherals and a lack of a floppy drive.

As VP of Hardware Engineering, Rubinstein was also responsible for overseeing the production of the G4 and G5 Macintoshes and became known as the man who explained “the megahertz myth.” As Apple began to shift its marketing strategy towards putting Macs at the center of the “digital lifestyle,” Rubinstein and his team were responsible for (under the direction of Jobs) the creation of the first iPod. When the success of the iPod began to take off, Apple spun this into its own division, with Rubinstein as the vice president in charge.

Life After Apple

Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and eventually join Palm, leading its research and development efforts. With the talent and skills he put to use while at Apple at his disposal, it’s no wonder many see his latest project, the Palm Pre, as a seductive competitor to the iPhone.

All other opinions aside, it’s interesting to note that Rubinstein joined Palm when it was at a point similar to Apple, when Jobs and Rubinstein came over from NeXT in the ’90s. On the whole, the introduction of the Palm Pre, the new Palm webOS, and the leadership of Rubinstein as the company’s new CEO, all lead towards a very interesting direction for Palm and its impact as a competitor to Apple.

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Two-Finger Scrolling for Pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks

Jenny Kortina — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:00:56 +0000

I was reformatting a Powerbook the other day and after a fresh Leopard install I went to use the two finger scroll function to scroll down a page…but it wasn’t there. I have been using intel based laptops for so long that I just take the two finger scroll feature function and the two finger secondary right click function for granted, and sorely miss them when they’re not available. Luckily, with the help of some third party software the two finger scroll feature and the two finger secondary right click function are easily added to older G4 laptops.

“iScroll2 is a modified trackpad driver that adds two-finger scrolling capabilities to supported pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks on OS X 10.3 and up. Supported models include most aluminum PowerBooks introduced from 2003 to 2004 as well as most G4 iBooks.”

Download iScroll 2 here,and install. After the install and a quick restart iScroll 2 will be an option in your system preferences.

I found that the default settings were way too sensitive, and I couldn’t easily scroll with them. I used the settings like the ones pictured below and they worked well, but I would suggest taking a few minutes to tweak them.

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My New Vintage Hardware – Can Leopard be installed on an 800MHz machine?

Stephanie Guertin — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:10:57 +0000

I have a vintage 800MHz iMac G4. There, I’ve said it, and wow, does that sound strange and unpleasant to me. I love my iMac – remember those commercials where it stuck its ‘tongue’ out at the guy on the sidewalk? – and I was very excited to hear, initially, that I could put Leopard on it. For a lot of people, these original-looking iMacs were their first sip of the Apple kool-aid: exciting, different, classy, with a form that looked like nothing else around as well as being ridiculously useful. (Pivoting, tilting monitor – yes please!) The version I have, when it first came out, was the top model for the iMac, and ones like it still command a solid 200 to 400$US on eBay.

So when Apple decided that Leopard would only officially support 867Mhz or higher machines now, I was heartbroken. I’m not alone here, either. The owners of the 800MHz flavors of iBook, PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver and Titanium), and eMac also now are the proud possessors of officially-vintage hardware. These are not, for the most part, considered to be slow or obsolete machines; granted, they’re not as screamingly fast as the new Macs, but they’re still reliable and steady.

However, I noted that Apple made this decision because the installer ran too slowly, which makes me wonder. Also, earlier dev builds ran on machines like these, if slowly. If I’m willing to let it sit for an hour or so, can I still install Leopard on my iMac? I know I’m not the only one that’ll be wondering, either.

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