Leopard On A G3


With the release of Mac OSX 10.5 'Leopard', Apple really raised the bar for minimum specs much to the annoyance - myself included - of a lot of Mac users. Panther was the first to have major hardware requirements. It would run on any G3 but had to have built in USB. Tiger was next stated your Mac had to have built in firewire and a recommended 256MB of RAM, although I have had it running with 96MB of RAM.

Leopard however, not only cut out the G3 range altogether but even low end G4s under 867Mhz were not allowed. Getting it to run on a G4 under the 867Mhz was quite easy with either an installation DVD hack, firmware tweak or cloning from another machine.

I used a hacked DVD to get it on my 400Mhz Titanium PowerBook G4. And once on it ran very well considering.

However, getting it on a G3 proves more difficult. It is more than just circumventing the installer requirements. There have been a number of reports of people getting it to run on a G3, but not in a useable state. Personally, I haven't been successful.

I have tried using the hacked DVD but this just sits at the grey Apple screen. I also tried clone my G4 hard drive onto the G3, but on reboot this also just came up with the grey Apple screen.

Those that have managed to run it on a G3 ran into some severe stability issues. It seems Leopard relies heavily on the AltiVec engine, something present in G4 processors and upward.

A Quartz Extreme enabled graphics cards helps with the Core Animation features giving you a smoother feel with things like Quick Look and Cover Flow, but even a card with just Quartz will run Leopard.

So it seems Apple really has cut off the G3. The one question on a lot of Mac users lips is what will 10.6 cut out. Will it be an end to the PowerPC platform altogether - no, I think that is too extreme even for Apple. I think it will definitely cut out the G4 altogether, leaving only the G5 left in the PowerPC range.

There is a little more information at Insanely Mac.
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This article/page was written/updated by Simon Royal in 2008. If you would like to add your comments, disagree with my views or believe it is stolen, or find it offensive then please email me.