After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90s, he famously simplified the company’s product line by drawing a four-product grid: consumer desktop (the bulbous, brightly colored G3 iMac), consumer laptop (then, just an empty space), professional desktop (the Power Mac, first the blue-and-white G3 and then the G4), and professional laptop (the PowerBook).

https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/theincomparable.com/podcast/20macs-20-power-mac-g5-xyz.mp3

M9457 Powermac G5 2.5GHz DP 1GB 250GB Super Drive - Pre Owned M9457 $325.00: M9749 Powermac G5 2.7GHz DP 2GB 250GB Super Drive - Pre Owned M9749 $459.00: M9592 PowerMac G5 Quad Core 2.5GHz 4GB 250GB SuperDrive-PreOwned M9592 $459.00: M9590LL/A Apple Power Macintosh G5 Dual Core (2.0GHz) PCIe-Late 2005 M9590LL/A $225.00. 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.

There was no consumer laptop in Apple’s product line until the iBook was announced. PowerBooks were expensive. And as for that consumer desktop, the G3 iMac was a wild success¹, but for years the real Mac users looked down on it as a weird, underpowered toy that wasn’t suited for getting real work done².

In this context, it’s easy to underestimate just how much importance the professional Mac tower had in the mind of the Mac world back in the day. As defined by the standards of the 90s and early 2000s, these were real computers—boxes you could open up and swap hard drives, install RAM, stick in expansion cards, maybe even upgrade the processor itself. Time and trends and Apple’s own predilections have led us to a world, two decades later, where the only Mac that fits these criteria starts at $6,000, but back then the desktop tower was the Mac. The one that mattered.³

In the summer of 2003, Apple introduced an entirely new Mac tower, one that traded the cute colorful plastic of the Power Mac G3 and the more subdued gray and silver plastic of the Power Mac G4 for a more serious industrial design, clad in aluminum. In the early 2000s, colorful computers were for consumers and monochrome computers were for serious computer users.⁴

The Power Mac G5 design represented the high-end Mac tower for a decade, keeping its distinctive look outside while adapting and changing on the inside. It survived the Intel transition. The G5 design, with a front panel punched so full of holes that it was 65 percent aluminum and 35 percent air, was so logical for a computer packed full of hot, high-powered components that after a six year hiatus, Apple brought back a Mac Pro that is deeply inspired by the design of the original. Like its predecessor, the 2019 Mac Pro also looks like nothing more than a giant box grater.

An executive briefing

The Power Mac G5 was announced at WWDC in 2003 as “the world’s fastest personal computer.” Steve Jobs pointed out it was also the first 64-bit processor in a desktop computer, proudly trumpeting Apple’s partnership with IBM to create the G5 processor, which was replacing the Motorola-built PowerPC G4 at the top of Apple’s product line.

Apple was proud of the hardware design, so proud that I managed to score a hands-on briefing where I could walk through the design decisions with Apple execs for a cover story in Macworld. Macworld Expo in New York was coming up, so the only time we could meet was on the afternoon of July 3, the day before the long Independence Day weekend.

My wife and our one-year-old daughter and I were driving down to L.A. for the weekend, so we ended up stopping at Infinite Loop on the way south. A very nice Apple P.R. person (I wish I could remember who she was!) took them to the Company Store while I went into the executive briefing center. My daughter ended up with a new Apple onesie out of the deal.

The briefing was one for the books. Greg Jozwiak—who still frequently takes to the stage at Apple events—represented product marketing and Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering was there for the engineering side. For an hour, we stood around an opened-up G5 and walked through every little corner of that tower, as they told story after story about why particular design decisions had been made.

Today, that would be a podcast interview, and maybe a YouTube video. Back then, it generated three pages of photos showing both sides of the G5 motherboard, the inside of the case, and the front and back of the computer’s exterior, complete with quotes from both of them. It was an unusual way to do that story, right down to my insistence that we quote them at length and refer to them by their nicknames, Joz and Ruby.

With 17 years of hindsight, the thing that sticks out the most about the G5’s design is just how obsessed it was about moving air around. Consider the two pro Macs that bracket this design: the previous tower, the final Power Mac G4, was nicknamed the “wind tunnel” because of its loud, aggressive fan noise. The 2013 Mac Pro, on the other hand, famously failed because it couldn’t keep its components cool enough, leading Apple into a “thermal corner” from which it couldn’t escape.

The G5 was all about moving air around intelligently and quietly. In the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs boasts about how it’s got nine fans, but you won’t hear them because they’re all individually computer controlled. If you took off the metal door on the outside of the G5, you’d be prompted by a clear plastic second door, this one there to keep the entire thermal container sealed. The power supply, processors, PCI cards, and storage bay were all separate air zones, moving from front to back.

Over the years, the airflow design on the inside changed as components changed, but the premise remained the same: Keep moving air through this thing so it can keep doing its job. It’s something the 2019 Mac Pro does, too. It’s a lesson learned from the Power Mac G5.

Bunny suits and betrayal

Don’t make Steve Jobs look like a fool. You will regret it.

Given the history between Jobs and IBM, it’s quite a thing to consider just how much praise Jobs and Apple lavished on IBM during the launch of the Power Mac G5.

The truth is, when Jobs returned to Apple he found the company in a vulnerable position when it came to Mac processors. The PowerPC chip architecture used in every Mac was a constant sore spot. It’s not quite fair to say Macs were always slower than comparable PCs running Intel processors, but they frequently were—and even when they weren’t, they often lagged behind in sheer clock speed. Try explaining to someone that a 1.5GHz Motorola G4 processor is actually faster than a 1.7 GHz Intel processor—either they won’t believe you because one number is larger than the other, or their eyes will just glaze over in boredom. (It happened on stage at Macworld Expo New York once. True story.)

Here’s what I wrote back in 2003:

Anyone who’s paid attention to the competitive world of desktop computers has noticed that as PC chip makers Intel and AMD have accelerated their chips to incredibly high clock speeds, the G4 has lagged behind. Lately, even Apple seemed to stop protesting that the gap was purely mathematical and not real.

Apple ended up hitching the future of Mac chip development to IBM, its other PowerPC alliance partner. IBM had been focusing on high-end workstation processors, and that seemed like a good fit for the Power Mac line, at least. Then Apple went to work doing its marketing thing, with that IBM relationship at the center. Steve Jobs held up a polished silicon wafer and showed photos of the IBM factory in Fishkill, New York, where the G5 was being made.

If anyone remembers Macworld Expo New York 2003, it’s as the last hurrah of the show in New York before it crept back to Boston to die. Jobs didn’t even appear, but there was still an Apple “opening feature presentation” (presented by Greg Joswiak) and a hefty Apple presence. I remember it differently, mostly because I was part of a group of journalists who took a field trip upstate to Fishkill to see the IBM factory. We put on white bunny suits and wandered through a series of clean rooms where robots created IBM’s cutting-edge processors, including the G5.

What a world! I’d written about Apple for a decade, only to suddenly find myself in an IBM factory. It wasn’t quite Microsoft HQ, but it still felt like being in the belly of the beast. But this was a new world. IBM and its chip-making prowess was now the savior of the Mac. A big, beautiful G5 future was ahead.

So, about that…

In hindsight, it’s clear that Steve Jobs placed a trust in IBM that it simply didn’t merit. I have to believe Jobs thought IBM could deliver 3GHz G5 chips within 12 months. (The G5’s fastest chip at launch was a dual 2GHz model—meanwhile, Intel was already selling 3GHz chips.) It was “a guarantee the likes of which Apple had never before offered,” as I wrote back then. Jobs seemed confident, IBM seemed confident, and they sold that confidence.

Apple shipped Macs with G5 processors for three years. There was never a 3GHz G5 chip. While there eventually was a G5 iMac, there was never a G5 laptop. The architecture wasn’t ever conducive to being used on mobile devices. Steve Jobs accepted an IBM projection, made a promise, hyped its relationship with IBM…and got burned.

Here’s what happened next: Apple revved up a secret project to ensure that Mac OS X could compile for Intel processors. Less than two years after members of the media frolicked in bunny suits in Fishkill, Apple announced that it was dumping the PowerPC entirely and moving to Intel. A couple of years later, Apple finally reached 3GHz with a Mac tower and it was a Mac Pro powered by an Intel Xeon processor.

Also in the background, Apple had begun talking to other chip design companies about alternatives to the G5, desperately trying to find a new chip to power its laptops. One of those companies was P.A. Semi, which Apple ended up buying outright in 2008. P.A. Semi’s engineering team became Apple’s chipmaking team.

This is perhaps the ultimate lesson of the entire G5 affair: Steve Jobs, and through him Apple’s larger corporate culture, was reminded that if you are reliant on a partner for a crucial portion of your business, you can’t truly control that business. Making the G5 was a side hustle of a side hustle of a company in transformation—it just wasn’t that important to IBM, but it was vitally important for Apple.

Jobs and Apple learned their lesson. The acquisition of P.A. Semi led to the A series of processors that run the iPhone and iPad. They are widely considered to be superior to the processors used by Apple’s competition. And now Apple has picked up stakes once again and plans to make Macs powered by new versions of those processors.

You could argue that the Power Mac G5 has IBM’s failure inscribed in its very name. But I prefer to consider the aluminum cheese-grater design as a classic that bridged the gap between IBM and Intel. It was a design too good to throw away, and after a brief blip, it’s still with us today—albeit in a modernized form with more stainless steel and weirder holes.

I’ll be back next week with number 19.

1. But that’s another article. ↩
2. Apple kept iterating on the iMac, and with every turn of the wheel it got better. Today I’d wager that very few Mac users do work that couldn’t be handled ably by an iMac. ↩
3. Laptops in this era were really slow. Hug your modern MacBook Pro and whisper words of thanks in its air vent. ↩
4. Looking at today’s gray-metal Macs makes me wonder if the computer design pendulum will ever swing back to glossy and colorful. I’d love to see a shiny, colorful laptop in the vein of the iPhone 11. ↩

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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.

Power Mac G5 For Sale

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.

Power Mac G5 Tower

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.

Power Mac G5 Service Manual

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.

Power Mac G5 Specs

Power Mac G5 Software

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.

keywords: #ppclinux #linuxonmac

Apple Power Mac G5 Price

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