A Puppy for the Mac mini?

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puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#1 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

Folks, I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Macintosh Mini. What made it tough was that, first, it wasn't Puppy. I really wanted it to be. Plus the live CD hung at boot because (as I later found out) the Airport Card had no driver supplied by the CD. I had to start the CD with that driver blacklisted. Huh?!

Next, for the sound to work, it had to be tweaked with a module configuration I searched the internet to discover.

I've used Puppies for many, many years on PCs with excellent results and I miss that ease and dependability that Puppy's team have made the Puppy Linux experience become. Still the best use-instantly-out-of-the-box distro I've found. Period.

Should any of you EVER decide to make a PowerPC version of Puppy, I'd push it's existence and use with unbridled relish.

There's a lot of old Mac hardware becoming obsoleted due to the aging web browsers they're being forced to use. With OSX Tiger, 10.4.11, you can only get Firefox 3.6.3. Geez I wish there was a Puppy for Macs. Anyone getting motivated yet? ;^)

Replies have to go to garrisonjs@yahoo.com as the old email addy is to a job I no longer hold and can't seem to get it altered by a moderator here. =^(

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Colonel Panic
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#2 Post by Colonel Panic »

A Puppy that would run on an old Mac is a great idea. I suspect it would be a non-trivial job to produce one though, as the Macintosh architecture is quite different from the PC architecture.

Perhaps somebody with more tech knowledge than mine can weigh in on this one?
Last edited by Colonel Panic on Fri 18 Jan 2013, 17:37, edited 1 time in total.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

Dewbie

#3 Post by Dewbie »


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Flash
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#4 Post by Flash »

The email address you give is already registered to another user. Did you reregister under another name? Did you actually ask me to change it?

puponmanyoldlaptops

Change Email Addresses?

#5 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

I AM that other user. In order to keep my job identity separate from my home identity I used my work email addy. I have had the yahoo addy for many, many years. And yes, if you can, please associate the yahoo addy with this ID.

I DID send a request for the fix quite some time ago.So if it's in your power to do so, please do.

Much obliged!
Last edited by puponmanyoldlaptops on Sun 20 Jan 2013, 03:06, edited 2 times in total.

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#6 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

@colonel panic:

Ubuntu has done it. My mini runs tremendously with the exception of the weirdness of the live CD not booting because the Airport Card driver wasn't included. I had to blacklist the card.

Second, the sound worked on the live CD but not after the install. I had to mess with blacklisting not-working drivers. I actually accidentally erased all the blacklisted ones and that made the Key Largo driver work Linux-magically.

I'd love to see a Puppy PowerPC disro because all that's available for a web browser are either Safari, which is the best of the lot, a patched 10.4 Fox which is atrocious, and Firefox 3.6.3 an ancient, sloggy thing. And I really like Puppy for old hardware. It really is the most complete, no fuss Linux ever for old PCs. There needs to be a Puppy for really old Mac hardware.

Switching to Ubuntu let me use Firefox 18. Fast and effective for everything except Flash.

The PowerPC won't play nice with Flash. That's no big deal as having a Linux alternative to the BSD Darwin OS X Tiger is really exceptional.

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#7 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

BTW: Running Puppy in OS X using VM is interesting, but my mini isn't running OS X. I'd like a Puppy that runs native on the selected hardware.

I'm looking for a Puppy for the PowerPC so that all those really old Macs, like the beige, can enjoy use. Yeah, with added USB and Firewire Cards SOME beige Macs can run OS X.

Mac hardware is not so exotic. The difference is the CPU. Mac devices are common to the PC world, so THOSE drivers can't be a big issue. The BIOS in a PC is called Firmware in a Mac.

It's a struggle getting a beige to run 10.3 which has little support in the real world. PowerBooks and iBooks easily run Tiger (10.4). But I'm still hoping for Puppy.

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#8 Post by bark_bark_bark »

Actually a Mac is 100% different than a PC.
....

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Flash
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#9 Post by Flash »

The reason I mentioned that the email address is registered to another user is that two users aren't allowed to have the same email address. I can't change your present email address to your home email address unless I first delete the account you registered with your home email address. What is it?

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russoodle
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#10 Post by russoodle »

puponmanyoldlaptops wrote:..PowerBooks and iBooks easily run Tiger (10.4). But I'm still hoping for Puppy.
Yes, my daughter has said she'll give me her old G4 iBook, which is running Tiger 10.4, so i'd love to be able to make it more useful and probably quicker with Puppy! Not so easy with Power PC architecture :(

There has been a forum member trying to do this for some time, unfortunately i can't recall his username at the moment....someone with a livelier memory might be able to help out here..

Easy enough to run Puppy on an Intel Mac, been doing it for a couple of years or so now.....initially, i was running live CDs with savefiles on usb flash drive, but finally got around to formatting this drive and now run only Puppy frugals from the hdd....gotta love it :D
[i][color=Green][size=92]The mud-elephant, wading thru the sea, leaves no tracks..[/size][/color][/i]

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#11 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

bark_bark_bark wrote:Actually a Mac is 100% different than a PC.
Heh. I KNOW we want to think of the Mac as being so different than the PC. The CPU in
PowerPC Macs is a RISC processor made by both Motorola and IBM.

Different, but a CPU nonetheless.

RAM is RAM. hard drives before the G3 were, in some machines, SCSI and in some IDE.

In the PC we enter the BIOS for some key settings. In the Mac we enter Open Firmware.

Actually not so different, but to get a Puppy to work on G3 Macs does require a different kernel and the drivers that are native to the Mac.

Texas Instruments sound. Ati Vdeo. Early bridge chips were Motorola. Others were custom Apple, but still used outsourced chips.

So 100%? No. The parts sources, yes. The motherboard construction, sorta. The computer itself, definitely.
Last edited by puponmanyoldlaptops on Sun 20 Jan 2013, 20:31, edited 1 time in total.

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#12 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

Flash wrote:The reason I mentioned that the email address is registered to another user is that two users aren't allowed to have the same email address. I can't change your present email address to your home email address unless I first delete the account you registered with your home email address. What is it?
The first user name was just puponoldlaptops. When I dropped the email address at work, I changed the user name to puponmanyoldlaptops.

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#13 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

russoodle wrote:
puponmanyoldlaptops wrote:..PowerBooks and iBooks easily run Tiger (10.4). But I'm still hoping for Puppy.
Yes, my daughter has said she'll give me her old G4 iBook, which is running Tiger 10.4, so i'd love to be able to make it more useful and probably quicker with Puppy! Not so easy with Power PC architecture :(

There has been a forum member trying to do this for some time, unfortunately i can't recall his username at the moment....someone with a livelier memory might be able to help out here..

Easy enough to run Puppy on an Intel Mac, been doing it for a couple of years or so now.....initially, i was running live CDs with savefiles on usb flash drive, but finally got around to formatting this drive and now run only Puppy frugals from the hdd....gotta love it :D
It has always been my "thing" to salvage computers considered too far past their prime. My first was in 2005. A Dell Latitude Pentium 1 with 144MB of RAM that the donor shoehorned Windows XP in.

I rescued it because the battery held a charge for two hours. Puppy 2.14, then Edupup (remember THAT?!) worked amazingly on it. And I found a network card that Puppy liked, so I websurfed with it, and used it in the store to sell people on using Puppy Linux.

I was so successful with my proselytizing that our Techs use a live Puppy CD to this day (I'm not there anymore) to check PCs for fitness and damage before they try to refurbish them for re-use.

And I made and distributed (out of my own pocket) many, many Puppy Linux CDs with printed instructions and my email address for those who were interested and wanted to use it

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#14 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

Flash wrote:The email address you give is already registered to another user. Did you reregister under another name? Did you actually ask me to change it?
I recall also using a third user name: caninieloop

But I mostly reserved it for other Linux Fora......

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#15 Post by bark_bark_bark »

Why I said that Macs are 100% different is because:

-Ubuntu developers had to create a seperate Ubuntu port for Macs (including Intel Macs) because the hardware is so different from a PC.
-Even in a Intel Mac, a lot of the hardware is different.
-When making RAM sticks for Macs, it's bit harder because the RAM is different than a PCs.
-Even keyboards have to be made differently at times.
-Macs overall have always been inferior (Performance-wise) to PCs.
-The graphics chip has to be made differently for Macs.

That is only part of the list.
....

puponmanyoldlaptops

A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#16 Post by puponmanyoldlaptops »

bark_bark_bark wrote:Why I said that Macs are 100% different is because:

-Ubuntu developers had to create a seperate Ubuntu port for Macs (including Intel Macs) because the hardware is so different from a PC.
-Even in a Intel Mac, a lot of the hardware is different.
-When making RAM sticks for Macs, it's bit harder because the RAM is different than a PCs.
-Even keyboards have to be made differently at times.
-Macs overall have always been inferior (Performance-wise) to PCs.
-The graphics chip has to be made differently for Macs.

That is only part of the list.
I was a non-Mac man until my ex-wife wanted one. I had to learn Mac to help her get set up in her quilting business. I still use both Macs and PCs and I like 'em both for different reasons.

I've used PC keyboards on Macs since the 1998 iMac went all-USB.

The Macintosh was always considered a custom computer. The designs and peripherals were different, and a little radical. Vis the Twentieth Anniversary Mac.

Inferior? Performance was leapfrog between Apple/ Motorola-IBM and Intel throughout the 90s. Wasn't until the Adobe Flash debacle that we all believed that the Mac was faster.

Either way, I save old Pentium boxen, I save old Mac PowerPC boxen because Linux, especially Puppy Linux, makes them useful.

It holds them up as examples of why not to discard or recycle some of them. This mini was a terrible websurfer until Ubuntu 12.04, thanks to Firefox 18. Still no flash, but wow. Great performance doing browsing and in-Mac tasks.

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Flash
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#17 Post by Flash »

I copied and pasted puponoldlaptops and caninieloop into the memberlist search. Neither one existed.

bark_bark_bark
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Re: A Puppy for the Mac mini?

#18 Post by bark_bark_bark »

puponmanyoldlaptops wrote:Inferior? Performance was leapfrog between Apple/ Motorola-IBM and Intel throughout the 90s.
Yes it was like that in the 90s, but I have never seen a modern-day mac with more than 32GB of RAM. PCs these days can have 64GB+ of RAM.

If you were willing to get a $2000 iMac, you can get a 3.2Ghz CPU in you're Mac. Still though in a PC we see 8-core processors with 4Ghz+. In a iMac it is only a quad-core processor.
....

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