Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

[kinless]

I guess I'll have to start this thread.

I was looking at some of the newly leaked System Requirements for OS X 10.5 Leopard this morning... (these may or may not be the final requirements when released to market)

- G4, G5 or Intel Processor
- DVD drive
- Built-in Firewire
- 256MB RAM (or 512MB RAM for Intel machines)
- built-in display, or any display connected to a supported video card
- 6GB hard drive (8MB w/ dev tools)

It looks like the latest legacy machines to get the "axe" will be any PowerPC models with a G3 processor. I tend to think the owners of iBook G3s (last discontinued in October 2003) will be the most disadvantaged with this software upgrade as far as legacy support is concerned.

So I ask thy question: Is Ryan going to even bother updating XPF to version 5.0 to run Leopard on any unsupported machines?

I plan on getting a Mac Pro in Fall 2007, but I'm curious to see if I can still install 10.5 on my upgraded Beige machine, which technically still meet the requirements.

But I'm sure there's a hefty amount of G3 owners out there who will want to run this software.

What say you?
_________________
Joey Kincer
www.kinless.com
-------------------
Beige Desktop
Sonnet G4/500MHz - 768MB RAM
ATI 128MB Radeon 9200 Mac Edition
OrangeLink USB2.0/FireWire
ATTO Express PSC -> 36GB ( OS X 10.3.9 )
Internal IDE -> 20GB ( OS 8.6 & 9.2.2 )

[adrie]

Yes--bringing this up IS a tough job, but SOMEBODY had to do it!

Since I've learned that Leopard will run on G4 (800Hz minimum), though, I think there's reason to be optimistic. And when you stop and really think about it, it IS in Apple's best interest. It might take a while, but I think our intrepid Ryan will crack the code!

[cgecastro]

It doesn´t have to be Ryan.
We just need someone to continue the development of the work ryan has done so far.
It shouldn't be to hard.
First there is a need to find the sources and a repository for them (owc could help with this.
Second get to work on:
fooling the installer to work on any machine with a g4 (or probably g3 but from some posts i read a few apps are not g3 compatible)
updating and/or creating new extensions to work with 10.5.

[vicjoe]

Now that Leopard is out and some experimenting done on "unsupported" machines reported, there is good news and bad news:
The good:
- the 867 mhz processor limit in the Leopard installer can be worked around or the installer script itself modified. Either one installs Leopard on another machine on a Firewire drive (presuming both are G4 machines) and transplants the drive or clones its contents to the legacy machine, or a read/write disc image is made of the Leopard install DVD, and one line of code in the installer script edited so it no longer does a processor check. The oldest machine I've heard of in which this was successful was a Sawtooth G4 running at 400 mhz.
-Leopard is a universal install, including its being extensively written to take advantage of Altivec on G4 and G5 chips. This is either good for those with a G4 upgrade or bad for those using a G3; it is likely impossible to get Leopard working on a G3 no matter how fast its clock speed.
The bad:
-bus speeds, both system and PCI. A system bus of 100 mhz seems to be the slowest that is acceptable, meaning the oldest machine possible would be the B&W Rev B. Pizmo powerbooks have also been successfully made to run Leopard; in both cases a G4 upgrade is necessary.
-as to the PCI, this is in the bad because Leopard requires a faster bus than is available using a PCI graphics card; a 2x AGP video bus would be the minimum.
-It may be theoretically possible to run a Sawtooth or Pizmo with 512 mb RAM, but that would mean the processor is working very hard and VM is resorted to heavily.

In sum, the oldest possible machines that might run Leopard would be those with a 100 mhz or faster bus, an AGP graphics bus, a G4 processor and at least 768 mb of RAM.

[kinless]

[mitch]

I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK:

Geeks have done it - Leopard on legacy macs. Go check it out:

http://www.macmod.com/software-mods/mac-os/1571-leopard-on-pre-pci

[vicjoe]

Whew! That is surely a gawdawful long article, throwing in mods on a B&W, a Beige and a couple of 8600/9600 machines. I suppose there is a certain convoluted logic to reporting discoveries on all these machines, but it makes it difficult to pinpoint what needs to be done with just one machine to modify. It would be better if there were 3 separate pages (with some unavoidable redundancy between them), one page for each machine.

The other thing is, the author doesn't disclose how fast his G4-modified Beige was running until near the end. He's using a 600 mhz G4. My suspicion is, in combination with the 66.6 mhz bus, that would be about the slowest one could contemplate, i.e. maybe a G4-400 mhz would technically work, the bottlenecks would pile up.

Still, very good detective work, and yes if someone could take over the XPF project and have the missing kext files available from XPF, that would be awesome.

And, one wonders what happens when Apple posts a security/incremental update to Leopard, if it can be installed from the modified machine, or if one has to go back to e.g. a Digital Audio to do it, then transfer it back to the older machine, manually adding and setting permissions for missing kext's again. Probably not, though if the update included changes to the kext's that are relied upon, this could happen. Thoughts anybody?