What 'Supported' Means to Apple
From Cristobal Daniels:
I hardly ever use DVD Player, in fact I find it annoying that I have
to take time to disable it from automatically opening and playing video
DVDs, and then turn off full-screen option (in case I start it by
accident). I usually have at least two free media players installed
which play DVD movies, often as an extra feature among many.
As far as models of Macs supported by Apple, some people seem to
forget that for Apple, "supported" means they have to provide service,
troubleshoot, and repair such models and be able to diagnose both
hardware and software problems. Against they're own economic interests.
Apple can't easily play PC customer support musical chairs ("the
problem is with the driver contact them": "no, its the OS, contact
them": "no its the hardware, send them the part/entire PC") "Not
supported" does not mean that any particular configuration won't work.
Many will work, maybe with some unnoticeable/minor glitches.
Cristobal Daniels
GeForce 6200 Yields Very Long Leopard Boot
Time
From Jerome Littleton:
Dan
Figured I would pass this info along: I had asked about the SATA drive on a Digital
Audio Power Mac. You said someone had one running, but it took 4
minutes to boot, but once up and running it was fast.
I purchased an Nvidia GeForce 6200 256 MB video card, the company
that sent it to me included instructions concerning Leopard. If running
Leopard it would be about a five minute boot time (this may be the
issue he is having with long boot time). If doing a clean install of
Leopard, they suggested putting the original video card back in for the
install. Once installed, upgrade the video card.
The card I purchased was originally for a PC and was flashed for a
Mac with 2 pins disabled (advertised as the Mac version - in a way I
guess it was). Hope this helps.
If you post this, I would like to mention beware of any dual 933 G4
Digital Audio Power Mac listed on eBay: it comes up as that in About
This Mac, a 933 G4 11.3 which is a 533. A 933 dual upgrade card was
manufactured by a third party, either Sonnet or NewerTech (cannot
remember). If it has an Apple card, it is a 533 g4 11.3.
I have looked and cannot find where Apple produced a dual 933 G4
11.3. I do not want someone to end up in the same boat as me, having to
upgrade something after paying for dual 933. Research before you buy if
you are new to Macintosh.
Jerome Littleton
Jerome,
Thanks for the info on the GeForce 6200. I'll be sure
to include a note about Leopard boot times in the card's profile. I've also
added a note to the Digital Audio Power Mac profile about the dual 533
MHz model sometimes being misreported as a dual 933 MHz computer.
Dan
Overclocked 700 MHz eMac Installs and Runs
Leopard
From Matt:
Hi Dan,
Just wanted to start by thanking you for the great site. Now then -
I have a 700 MHz eMac (1 GB RAM,
GeForce 2 MX) that obviously would not be able to install Leopard -
unless it was overclocked! Fortunately, I already had my big white
wonder clocked up to 900 MHz, thus qualifying it for Leopard. No tricks
were needed on the software end - it installed without a hitch. The
whole system seems about 90-95% as responsive as Tiger was.
Also, I tried DVD Player, knowing some people have had issues on the
lower end - it ran beautifully. The "better quality" deinterlacing
option was greyed out (likely because of an inadequate graphics chip),
but I would say that it still seemed to look better than Tiger's DVD
playback. I was truly impressed!
Just thought I'd throw this into the fray, in case any adventurous
overclockers were out there wondering if they'd need a modified install
disc. :-)
Matt
Matt,
Thanks for the field report. It seems that any Mac
running past the 866 MHz mark can run the installer. Nice to hear it's
working so well for you.
Dan
Leopard on 2 More Power Macs
From Jeff Plourde:
Hi! My name is Jeff, and I successfully upgrade my G4 Sawtooth 400 (overclocked to 500) with the
modified installer. It seem to run fine and faster. The only thing
missing was the Dock, but after I unplugged my 320 gig hard drive
(since the ATA-HI_CAP driver won't run under Leopard), the Dock is back
and working well.
Using the same modified installer on my new Dual 800 Quicksilver, and saw the same
result.
- G4 500, 896 MB RAM, GeForce 2 MX400 flashed
- G4 800DP, 1.5 Gig RAM, GeForce 2
Jeff
Jeff,
Thanks for the report - and especially the note about
the hi-cap driver.
Dan
Leopard on Dual Processor 533 MHz Power Mac
From Eje Hultén:
Hello, just want to inform on my experience with Leopard on a DP
533.
Installed Leopard on my wife's DP 533 MHz with 1.5 GHz RAM and a
Belkin "High-Speed Wireless Network Card". I did this on Leopard's
first day on the market using a G4 Mac mini
1.42 GHz as installer and DP 533 as a FireWire disk. This was a
clean install. I then reinstalled Office 2004, iLife, and some other
software officially compatible with Leopard, the DP 533 has been
running as good as it did with Tiger ever since - and booting-time is
shorter with Leopard.
Yours,
Eje Hultén
Sweden
Eje,
Thanks for your report.
Dan
Leopard on 700 MHz eMac
From Jeremy Taylor:
I got Leopard running this weekend on my 700 MHz eMac, 512 RAM, the
video in it is a 32 MB GeForce 2 MX. I hacked the installer and ran
installation from my 3G FireWire iPod. So far, the system works great.
I don't have an external drive, so I can't try out Time Machine, but
from what I have read it won't work anyway, since my machine only
supports Core Animation in software. Otherwise, it seems good to
go!
Jeremy,
Thanks for one more data point. Nice to know Leopard
works well on so many unsupported Macs.
Dan
Leopard Failure on a Cube
From Mark F:
Dear Dan Knight,
Here is my partial report of a failed attempt to install "Leopard"
Mac OS X 10.5.0 on a G4 Cube last
Saturday. I made no notes; this is entirely from memory. Please forgive
any inaccuracies or inconsistencies.
I attached the G4 Cube's hard drive (Mac OS X 10.4.10) in Target
Disk Mode as a FireWire 400 drive to a 20" iMac G5 where I had previously installed
Leopard.
- I backed up the G4 Cube to another FireWire partition using
Carbon Copy Cloner
3.0.1.
- I rebooted the iMac G5 from the Cube's hard drive.
- I ran the Leopard installer, first wiping the Cube's hard drive, as
was required by the installer.
- I attempted to restart the Cube from its Leopard clean
install.
- There was a gray background at boot time. There was no Apple logo.
There was no 'spinning spokes' (or 'gear') activity indicator
In short, the G4 Cube would not boot or reboot. The memory chime is
audible, but there was no screen activity.
I restarted the G4 in Target Disk Mode. The FireWire logo did not
display.
I restored the Mac OS X 10.4.10 partition to the Cube using Carbon
Copy Cloner 3.0.1.
The Cube boots normally, however the Apple logo and spinning spokes
do not appear. The first sign of success is the blue background, which
indicates, I believe, a successful load of the Mac OS X kernel.
Subjectively, the boot seems to take longer, but perhaps this is
because it now lacks familiar progress landmarks and, of course, I am
watching more intently on an 8-year-old machine!
I believe that I have damaged the firmware on the G4 Cube somehow. I
will probably repeat this experiment on the same G4 Cube or another
one, using a 1.42 GHz G4 mini as host,
and see if I do better. I also plan to install Leopard on a G4 733
MHz.
Any advice you may have will of course be appreciated.
Mark F
Mark,
Odd indeed, as we have received successful reports of
running Leopard on the Cube. The first thing I'd try is going to
Power
Mac G4 Cube Firmware Update 4.1.9 :Information and Software on
Apple's website, downloading Firmware Update 4.1.9, boot into Mac OS
9.1 or later, and install the Firmware Update as detailed on Apple's
page.
You might also try cloning the Leopard installation
from your G5 iMac to the Cube's hard drive using Carbon Copy
Cloner.
Dan
3 More Unsupported Leopard Field Reports
From Mark Benson:
- 768 MB RAM
- Standard 800 MHz/256 KB L2 cache
- GeForce 2 MX 32 MB onboard (4x AGP)
- 80 GB Hard Disk
Modified the installer image onto a FireWire external hard drive. I
ran the installer on the target machine.
Most everything works okay, including Time Machine and DVD Player.
The biggest issues are both to do with the graphics card drivers, I
think. One is the machine comes out of sleep and the screen comes up
flat white, no desktop at all, making it impossible to use. The other
is that the screen blanker that turns off the screen actually just
freezes an image on the screen and stays on. It even dims the
backlight, waits, then turns the backlight back up to it's
normal level when the blanker is supposed to kick in. I think these may
get fixed, I have seen mention on the Apple support forums of people
with supported G4 iMacs with GeForce 4 MX (effectively an
over-clocked GF2 MX internally, from what I can gather) having the same
issues. Like I say, I think it's a driver bug.
Performance is okay, but the graphics are quite ropey. I put most of
this down to the scrawny GF2 MX graphics chipset - it always was
rubbish for anything GPU intensive in Macs and PCs. I haven't changed
anything since the install.
- 768 MB RAM
- Standard 667 MHz/256 NB L2 cache
- ATI Radeon Mobility with 16 MB DDR SDRAM (4x AGP)
- 30 GB Hard Disk
Unfortunately, because the FireWire port is dead on my TiBook, I had
to remove the hard drive and attach it via FireWire to the iMac G4.
Having done this, I simply Carbon Copy Cloned the iMac's installation
over to the Powerbook's drive.
Worked just fine, although it was awfully confused the first time it
booted. I let it settle, index, and set the correct hostname and
computer name, etc., and rebooted. From there it's worked okay. Sleep
works fine; I haven't tested the DVD Player or Time Machine, because
the machine is not really used for anything like that.
Performance is more than acceptable. Having the ATi graphics card
seems to make all the difference! This machine is usually shot-for-
shot on a par with the iMac above - it certainly was in Tiger - but it
runs Leopard better. It's no Indy 500 racer, but it's not bad for a
battered and bruised 6-year-old laptop I got for free as a gift from a
fellow geek. :) No hardware changes have been made.
- 768 MB RAM
- Sonnet Crescendo G4/ZIF 500 MHz/1 MB Cahce
- ATI Radeon 9200 PCI (66
MHz) Mac Edition with 128 MB DDR VRAM
Leopard won't boot because of a lack of driver. I ensured this
machine wasn't listed in the 'bad machines' string when I modded the
installer, and the minimum speed is set to 266 MHz (below the level of
the slowest G4 I know of!). The installer kernel panics at boot,
claiming it has no driver for this class of Power Mac. I really
want to get Leopard working on this machine, as it's probably better
equipped than both the other unsupported machines I have, and I've been
using the machine since I graduated in 2002.
Mark Benson
Mark,
Thanks for the info. I'll be sure to add notes to the
G4 iMac profiles for models with GeForce 2 and GeForce 4 graphics about
the sleep problem.
Dan
Leopard on Pismo Update
From Adem Rudin:
Hi Dan;
This is a final Leopard followup [see Leopard on an Upgraded Pismo].
First, the ATIRage128 kexts, bundles, and plugins had no effect on
DVD playing abilities, other than a message about the ATIRage128.kext
being improperly installed.
As for the other 7 .kext files mentioned, newer versions of all
seven are actually present on a default Leopard system, which is
rather confusing in the case of some, such as "AppleMediaBay.kext", as
I am not aware of any Apples made after the Pismo that include a media
bay, so why would Apple include this in an OS that does not support the
Pismo?
In any case, I experimented with replacing the Leopard versions of
these kexts with their Tiger versions and ended up with a 'Book that
would not boot. Using FW Target Disk Mode to reinstall all of the
default Leopard kexts failed to bring the Pismo back into bootable
shape.
I re-imaged the Pismo with the backup of it's Tiger install I made
with Carbon Copy Cloner, and all was well. I think I'm sticking with
Tiger on this thing for the time being.
-Adem
Adem,
Thanks for the update.
Dan
Sawtooth: Maximum RAM, OS X Support
Hi Dan,
Does not the Sawtooth take 2 GB RAM? Low
End Mac states 1.5 GB. Apple
states 1.5 GB.
EveryMac states 2.0 GB.
I also note the Apple page does not acknowledge OS X compatibility.
EveryMac notes 1.5 GB available for OS 9; 2 GB for OS X.
Best regards,
Steve
Steve,
All G4 Power Macs prior to the Mirror Drive Door model
have only three slots for RAM, and the largest module they support is
512 MB. EveryMac got it wrong.
As for Apple's Sawtooth profile, it's ancient. Apple
generally creates these when a model is new and rarely updates them -
no mention of Mac OS 9.1 or 9.2 either. The Sawtooth is fully supported
through Mac OS X 10.4.whatever, and we have several reports of
10.5 "Leopard" working on it as well, although you have to work around
the installer to get it there.
Dan
Oops, I was wrong. An eagle-eyed reader more familiar
with these older G4 Power Macs than I pointed out that while the
Sawtooth and Mystic models only support 1.5 GB with Mac OS 9, there
are four RAM sockets, allowing up to 2 GB of RAM with OS X. dk
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
