Creative Ideas for an Old Mac G5

StradivariusBone

StradivariusBone

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I have a Macintosh G5 that was originally used as the office computer here, but since I started has been occupying real estate on a shelf. It ran painfully slow so I wiped it with OSX 10.4. I was thinking it would be nice to use it as a permanent audio workstation and leave it at our sound desk, however even QLab 2 requires at least 10.5. I'm trying to locate the correct OSX CD here, but in the mean time I was wondering what you all might do with such a beast in such a space.

I've already thought about boat anchor and bar b q grill

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/05/old-mac-g5-gets-a-new-lease-on-life-as-a-bbq-grill/
 
Have you considered aquarium?
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There are kits available that adapt the case to fit regular ATX motherboards and power supply's. So you can build a brand new computer, but keep that awesome case. You can even put OS X on it, search for "hackintosh". It's extremely stable and not as sketchy as it sounds!
 
The G5 has a PowerPC processor, which means it will only support up to OS X 10.5. So you could get QLab on it, but I would imagine that new versions past what you have aren't going to be compatible. OS X from 10.6 on will only run Intel processors.
 
Yeah, it's a county machine. If it were mine I would consider the more athletic mods described, but outside of maybe putting Ubuntu on it, I don't think I'm going to want to invest a ton of time on this hardware. I'm hunting for a 10.5 disc so I can at least run QLab2. I was just hoping someone had a mind-blowingly simple way to make this useful.

Thanks!

-ED
 
For the record, I'm told there's an even newer "version fence"; past some version, OS/X requires 64 bit boot roms, making even older Intel's useless.

As far as I'm concerned, such people deserve what they get, though it's probably impolite of me to say so in public...
 
From what I understand, 10.6 onward uses the 64 bit kernel which potentially causes issues with some applications that use 32 bit extensions. But a lot of these issues can be patched too. At least on a windows machine the only reason to go 64 but is to take advantage of the extra memory capacity, I'm not sure of the trade off with OSX.


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It depends on the processor. The early Intel Macs with the Core Solo/Duo appear to be the only 32 bit ones.

Regardless that doesn't even apply to the PowerMac in question. I just like to find a use for resources and it's actually working quite well running Audacity for quick and dirty recordings from our condensers on the catwalk. We've got a MacBook Pro for running QLab anyways, so that wasn't a loss.

I can't fault Apple for wanting people to buy their stuff and since people do buy their stuff pretty regularly it's working out for them. You always have the option to not buy their stuff. As for me, I'd rather have just stayed with XP. 7 gets too bossy and Mavericks is just weird sometimes.
 
I had to of the full size power pc g5 cases. I bought a cheap glass coffee table at the thrift store, pulled out the glass, and mounted it to the g5 cases. Now it's a nice coffee table with tho g5's as the base. Perfect addition to my studio.
 
I still use my 2004 G4 Powerbook daily. I'm still running OS X (10.5.8). There are few open source software that still get updated for these machines and you will find no commercial products supporting PowerPC anymore. The main key to my system still being useful is TenFourFox (Firefox backported to PowerPC with support for OS X 10.4 or later) keeping the browser reasonably up-to-date. I'm considering moving do Debian (not the easiest Linux distro, but likely to keep official PowerPC builds for quite some time) for the OS but can't yet give up using Adobe InDesign (original version). If you don't want to use it as a computer under these software constraints, there may be a PowerPC enthusiast in your local area (costs to ship would probably be more than anyone would be willing to pay) that would like it.
 
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