The MorphOS lust may soon be over...

[AmigaBruno]

I've got a Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver", which has been lying around for some time now unused. I got it free of charge from an office which advertised on http://www.freecycle.org and I just had to carry it home. At first I had no idea how it compared with a Mac I'd been using in a recording studio, but I soon found out how incompatible it was. It came with OSX 10.3.9 and iWork installed, but I didn't get any install discs with it. Eventually, my installation got corrupted. I guessed the password was the name of the company I got it from and found that it accepted it. Unfortunately, I found I was unable to get my hands on any install CDs or DVDs for it. Eventually, I got a DMG file of an install DVD for OSX 10.5 through Dropbox, but then I found that I couldn't manage to burn this either on my Power Mac G4 or on my laptop under Ubuntu Linux or under Windows 7. I finally took the DMG file on a USB memory stick to the recording studio and they couldn't burn it on their Mac Pro Intel XEON either!

Meanwhile, my Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" has been sitting there unused and has become just a shelf for magazines, books, and floppy disks. I really feel I must do something with it, but I'm not sure what. This speed is 867Mhz, but I can't remember the other specs at the moment. It has plenty of space on TWO hard drives. I think the possibilities are as follows.

1. Finally get an OSX 10.5 or 10.6 installation DVD and install that (unlikely, as I've failed so far)
2. Install MorphOS (I managed to boot from a DVD, so this proves it's compatible)
3. Install AmigaOS 4 (NOT 4.1) using an ISO file I downloaded tonight which says it uses the loader Moana and will install onto a Mac Mini G4. I don't know if my Power Mac G4 is compatible.
4. Install Yellow Dog Linux
5. Install Free BSD for Power PC

What do you think I should do with it and why?

[AmigaBruno]

This is your best option. OS X will be completely unsupported on this machine - Apple seem to pretend that PowerPC Macs don't exist any more.

Best advice here: forget it. Moana is not complete, and wouldn't work anyway. It was abandoned when it was decided to stick to new hardware for OS4 so that it wasn't tied to obsolete hardware and technologies (but please let's not argue about the pro's and con's of that decision in this thread as it's OT and done to death already).

What's the point? It'd just be an underpowered, incompatible version of what you can run on any old PC.

MorphOS, definitely.

I know I could only install OSX 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6 which would have to be for Power PC, but it has the look and feel of Mac OSX and can run various old Mac software, which can produce files compatible with other operating systems. This software includes iLife with Garageband and a web page designer.

It seems that I may be able to install AmigaOS 4.0, but at least I can TRY anyway.

I should install SOMETHING else onto it, because it's not doing anything at the moment.

MorphOS is something I'm still considering on installing.

[AmigaBruno]

@ AmigaBruno

OS4 won't work. Moana is hard-coded to require PowerMac10,2 hardware, which corresponds to the Mac Mini G4 "silent update" (1.33GHz and 1.5GHz machines only). Besides, it's an old, buggy, beta version of OS4. The kernel and drivers are incomplete, barely work and will never be updated. If you want to try it on your Quicksilver, I suggest not spending more time on it other than to see "Well, that didn't work" after the initial boot attempt.

EDIT: And to actually talk about some things your Quicksilver *can* do: I would suggest triple-booting MorphOS, OSX 10.4, and OSX 10.5 (10.6 requires x86).

10.4 is the last version of OSX to support "classic" emulation, meaning you can run programs requiring MacOS 9 and lower - opens up a big back catalog of software.

10.5 runs some newer stuff. Most of the recent programs that still support PPC require 10.5

And MorphOS is to fulfill your Amiga needs

@ haywirepc

You may like this AmigaOS 3.x skin if you're finding MorphOS's visuals not to your liking. I use this one and am quite fond of it!

Unfortunately, I've tried to buy some compatible Mac OSX install DVDs from eBay, but I always got outbid, then they started getting rarer. Before I got this Mac, I bought a Blueberry iMac, which runs OS9. On the Power Mac G4, I found that I couldn't do much with OSX 10.3.9 and that OSX 10.4 was a milestone, so I've been trying to upgrade it. I don't know what could be so special about any Mac OS9 software in this day and age to make me want to run it.

I recently read about Darwin OS, but I don't think installing it would enable me to fix this Mac.

I think I'll have to study Uboot to find out how it works.