macosx now on old powermacs and powerbooks!

Zammy-Sam

Zammy-Sam

Desertchild
Ryan Rempel developed a beta version of XPostFacto, which will allow your old powermac or powerbook to work with macosx. Supporting models: 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500, 9600 and also many Clones and PowerBooks.
XPostFacto is a utility which helps to install and boot Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, and Darwin on certain unsupported systems. When Mac OS X installs successfully, its stability on unsupported systems appears to be excellent. However, there are cases in which Mac OS X is difficult to install, and there are a variety of problems you can run into. So read carefully. You should also remember to check the online version of this documentation from time to time, to see whether there have been any changes.
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Price: $25!!!
 
Heh... where you been, Zammy? This software's been out for more than two years now!

Sadly, I can't get my old 8500 to run Panther. It always gives me "There were errors installing the software" at 98% complete... :(
 
You are right ElDiabblo. Somehow I missed this project and when I read about this new beta, I got very excited (eventhough it's not interesting for me).
Did you try this new beta as well or is it even an old beta? ;)
 
Oh, no, the beta is brand-new -- but there were 17 alpha versions before-hand, many of which were public. There was a version 2 before this one as well, which supported 10.1 and 10.2.

It works well -- I've used it a few times to install OS X on unsupported machines like a beige G3. It's just my luck that my G3/400MHz-upgraded 8500 won't work, and I've been wrestling with this problem for almost 10 months! I'm about to say "screw it" and just load Linux back up on it... :( Perhaps I can get 10.2 to install? I dunno... seems like a lot of work just so I can say, "Cool, OS X on my unsupported, slow-ass machine!"
 
I am wondering why you want to get rid of os9 (if that's was your previous os beside linux). I think it should work just fine on your 8500 and what advantages would linux give you?

Btw, what are those $25 for when it's still a beta (since you mentioned it's in this testing phase for quite some time). Or do they want you to pay for the beta?
 
Well, there never really was a previous OS on this computer. I got it used for $50, and put in a G3/400MHz upgrade and some RAM for about $150. I thought it would be a useful computer with OS X installed on it, but it never worked, so I loaded YellowDog on it and dealt with that for a while. So, in actuality, it's never really been used at all -- just kind of sits around waiting for me to do something with it. I could load OS 9 on it, but to be frank, I'm sick of OS 9 and ready for OS X.

I'll keep fiddling with it -- I have a feeling it could be a RAM problem (I put some 128MB sticks in it, which Apple never really supported, but they work) and I've also got a 9GB UltraWide LVD SCSI drive in there connected to the slow SCSI-1 onboard controller via an adaptor. Nothing in the machine is stock, save for the CD-ROM drive, so with all that together, the problem could be anything.

XPostFacto's been free since inception, but now it's proven a really useful tool and I see $25 as just about the right price. Ryan Rempel (the author) is amazing with this piece of software, and it works better than other software produced by commercial companies (Sonnet's PCI X software, for example, that costs $30 and never really worked right). It seems as though $25 is a suggested donation, but I'm sure he'll start charging in the future once the software is out of beta.
 
So, you are actually supposed to pay for a beta-ware.. Hmmm, doesn't smell good to me, no matter how famous and good the software is.
Anyway, I was always wondering if one couldn't simply install osx on a certain harddisc and simply plug that disc to his older mac, let's take the 8500. Or even more simple: use the disc in the macosx_unsupported_system as a firewire drive and simply install macosx from another system mounting that disc. Could you properly boot with that old system?
I know, sounds too good and too easy to be true ;)
 
Well, I ain't payin' until it works for me! If it does work and I can reproduce the installation without errors a few times, then I'll gladly pay him $25. Hell, I'll have a G3/400MHz machine with Panther on it for under $250 by then. Not too bad.

The way XPostFacto works is that it overwrites or installs certain modified extensions and files so that OS X thinks it's running on a supported machine. Once OS X is installed, there's no need for XPostFacto anymore unless you need to reboot between OS 9 and OS X. You can update software and the system without having to reinstall any modified extensions or anything.

That's one reason you can't take a hard drive with OS X on it and just plop it into an unsupported machine -- it'll refuse to boot. But, you CAN take an OS X hard drive, plop it into an unsupported machine, then use XPostFacto to update some of the modified extensions and then boot the machine into OS X. The problem is that my main OS X machine is a G4 PCI machine, which doesn't have any SCSI support, so my only option is to install OS X via XPostFacto directly onto the SCSI drive on the 8500... I was thinking about getting a PCI ATA card and putting an old 10GB IDE drive into the machine, but that would cost me another $100 and I'm just not willing to put anymore money into this old machine. Plus, I'm betting that the requirements for Tiger are gonna be an AGP card, which would put my main OS X machine below the requirements, and it's time for a new machine anyway.

Ah, well, I can remember when the 8500s were brand new and cost $3000 depending on how you configured them. They were some awesome machines, save for the ridiculously complex layout that requires you to actually remove the motherboard just to upgrade the RAM.
 
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