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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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

Mac Os 9 G5

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?

Hardware

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.

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: Ouch

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.

Mac Pro G5

keywords: #ppclinux #linuxonmac

short link: https://goo.gl/anff6h

Mac OS Leopard 10.5 is the sixth release by Mac OS for Apple’s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. It is available in two editions: for desktop or personal computers and server version (Mac OS X Server). The retail price for the desktop version is $129 and $499 for the server version. It was released on October 26, 2007.

This is the final version of Mac OS X which can support the PowerPC structure as snow leopard function only on Intel-based Macs. The latest released is 10.5.8 (Build 9L31a) on August 13, 2009. Its kernel type is hybrid (XNU). This version is preceded by Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and succeeded by Mac OS X snow leopard. It is the first operating system that has open-source BSD to be certified as fully UNIX cooperative.

Download: Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 ISO and DMG file

License
Official Installer

File Size
7.8GB

Language
English

Developer
Apple Inc.

Tutorials: How to Clean Install Mac OS using a USB drive on Mac

New Features Added to Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

This new Mac OS Leopard 10.5 ISO comes with many new features like:

• An improved Automator is introduced. It can create and edit work with the new interface. A new feature ‘watch me do’ is introduced that record user action and reply as an action in a work. It can create more useful work with action for RSS feed, PDF manipulation and much more.

• It has the feature to access a file on their computer while far from home through the internet.
  
• It has a new group feature called stack which displays a file in a ‘fan’ style, ‘grid’ style and a ‘list’ style.
  
• It has redesign 3D dock.
  
• New dictionary in Japanese is introduced.
  
• The front row has been updated which closely resembles the interface of original Apple TV.
  
• Safari 3 is introduced which includes web clip.
  
• This version of Mac comes with an interesting feature called time machine. It allows the user to back up the deleted or replaced by another version of the file. Time machine does not make bootable copies of backed up the volume, it does not backup encrypted FileVault home dictionary until the user logout. It also does not back up to Airport Disc hard drives but this issue is been resolved on March 19, 2008 update.
  
• It doesn’t the support classic application.
  
• It comes with a total of 18 languages.
  
• It comes with Alexa voice to voice over and the Apple company assured that it is the most natural and understandable voice yet.
  
• A quick look is available which allows us to view the document without opening them in external software.
  
• An updated version of photo booth is introduced which allow us, user, to record video with real-time filter and blue/ green screen technology.
  
• It offers Objective-C 2.0 runtime, which has new features such as garbage collection

System requirements for this new version for Mac OS

To enjoy this version of Mac OS X, there are some basic requirements for a system like:

• If we are talking about the processor then we need an Intel processor or PowerPC of G5 or G4 (867 MHz and faster).

• The DVD drive, internal or external for installation of the operating system.
  
• Minimum of 512MB of RAM is required for the proper functioning of the system. Additional of 1Gb of is recommended for development purpose.
  
• Minimum of 9 GB of the disc is required.

These are the features required for the general purpose.

For some features specific requirements in the Mac are :

• Time machine application needs an additional hard drive.
  
• For boot camp, a Mac with Intel processor and Windows XP service pack 2 or Windows Vista is required.
  
• 1.8GHz PowerPC G5 is required for the DVD player for improved de-interlacing.
  
• An insight camera (external or built-in), USB video class camera or Firewire DV camcorder, an Intel or PowerPC G5 processor is required for the photo booth.
  
• Audio chats required microphone and 56kbs speed of internet connection.

Technical details of Mac leopard 10.5

• Filename:- osx_leopard_10.5_install.iso
• File size :- 7.8 GB
• Developer:- Apple

To get this latest version of Mac

If we set our mind to upgrade our Mac with latest features then we have to upgrade our pc with Leopard 10.5. The ISO file is available on the official website as well as on the apple store. We have to decide what type of installation we require because it comes with three types of installation: Upgrade, Archive and Install, Erase and install.

Archive and install take the middle ground method. This installer moves all your data in one folder and then create a clean installation of OS X 10.5 Leopard. This method allows the user to get all their existing data including the user account. Installation of Leopard OS in the Mac, you have to boot from the Leopard install DVD.

Installation process step by step:

• First, we have to insert the OS X Leopard install DVD into Mac DVD drive.
• After that an install Mac OS X on display on the screen and we have to double click it.
• Click the restart button when the install Mac OS X open.
• Enter the administrator password and press the OK button.
• Mac will restart and boot from the installation DVD. Restarting from the DVD take some time, so be patient.

How To Get Mac OS Leopard on your Mac

Snow leopard comes with no option other than upgrade, but with few extra steps, we can perform erase and install. The ISO file is available at the Apple official website and also on apple store. For installation, there are some system requirements like

• An Intel Mac because it doesn’t support older PowerPC Macs.
• At Least 1GB of Ram is required to run the Snow Leopard.
• It requires 5GB of free space for installation in the system.
• A DVD drive is also required.

After gathering all the requirement, now it’s time to install the Snow Leopard in PC

• Prepare the PC for installation like backup data, repair drive errors and disc permission.
  
• Insert the Snow Leopard install DVD into the DVD drive.
  
• Then after double click the install ‘Mac OS X’ icon.
  
• Click the continue button after opening the Mac OS X Installer.
  
• Select the drive which has already OS X 10.5 installed.
  
• Click the customize button if we want to change anything to package.
  
• When we are ready to install with default application then click the install button.
  
• Enter the password and click the ‘OK’ button.
  
• Copy the core file and restart.

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 ISO & DMG file Direct Download - ISORIVER

Mac OS Leopard 10.5 is the sixth release by Mac OS for Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. It is available in two editions:

Price Currency: USD

Operating System: Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

Application Category: OS