“Apple usually weeds out a few machines with new versions of OS X, but 10.5 is the first release I’m aware of that will exclude a larger number of machines from being able to run the new OS. For example, my trusty G4 fails to meet the minimum processor requirements — it has enough RAM to run 10.5, but the installer prevents me from installing. I doubt I’ll be alone here,” ‘vorlonwarrior’ reports for macosxhints.
“All is not lost, however, as it is possible to modify the file that checks the machine specs and decides if 10.5 can be installed,” ‘vorlonwarrior’ reports.
The instructions are in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a bit of a convoluted process and not explained in enough detail as Terminal newbies might like, but, as our old (circa 1999) test Power Mac G4 (AGP) 450MHz, yes, 450MHz, with 1GB RAM, attests: it does work. Have you been successful with installing Leopard on unsupported Macs? If so, please, let us know how did you did it below.
Anyone running this on a Cube?
Installing Leopard on really old Macs makes Lisa cry.
It’s running fine on my PS3
How is performance for those on an upgraded single or dual G4?
any way to install this on an old G3 iBook?
I just attached a a 533 mhz G4 in Firewire mode to my “approved G4” and installed Leopard on it that way, and it works just fine and actually, doesn’t seem to run any slower than Tiger did.
Just installed it on my IIvx. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if it’s working right as I have been waiting 4 days for the login screen.
Over at MacsOnly.com they installed Leopard onto an external firewird drive and used carboncopycloner to transfer it to a Cube. Go to http://www.macsonly.com/arch00710.html to see how they did it.
Clever Torn8o,
I wonder if I could hook up a G4 in Firewire Target mode to my Macbook? It probably wouldn’ t install the right software for the G4 hooked to an Intel Mac. Or does it always install a universal?
The FireWire Target Disk Mode trick only works from PPC-machines. The installer is Universal Binary, but it only installs code for the processor family of the machine it’s booted on.
I haven’ tried it yet, but what if I take the HD and install on an “approved” mac, install the OS then take that same drive and then install into an “unproved” mac?
If the restriction only happens during install, would this still work? Or is there a restriction check at boot as well that needs to be reconfigured?
MDN: AS YOU DELETED MY EARLIER COMMENT I REPEAT IT:
Your annoying pop ads are even more annoying under leopard, as they jump up in separate spaces from the one safari is running in….
MDN has lots of attitude but no style. This site is slow and badly designed.
Just Don’t Do It.™
If Apple has decided to forego the profits from a sale of a Leopard upgrade to you, it has undoubtedly done so because it would Suck Bad on your machine. The author says he has enough RAM to run Leopard, but so what? Is the GPU on his graphics card capable of running enough Core Image filters natively to give satisfactory performance in Spaces and Quartz Extreme? Does Core Video support GPU-accelerated codecs on that card?
If you want to install Leopard on your legacy machine, and don’t care that your experience will probably be Really Really Bad, then go for it.
I must agree that subjecting readers to pop-up ads is uncouth to the max.
Go it running on one of my robotic dogs.
Mac112 is correctly, you can’t do a PowerPC mac from an Intel, the intel macs will only work with GUID partition mode, so you would need a G4, or G5 to do the Firewire Target mode to an unsupported G4. Some people have run into video problems coming out of sleep using this method, but I haven’t run into that issue yet. The 533 isn’t my main computer of course, but it seems to be running just fine for the past few days.
FYI …. quit complainin’ !!
There IS a Pith Helmet made for Safari 3…
Look for it !
Fer crying out loud…
My dual 800 wasn’t supported, so I put it in Firewire target mode, through a cable over to my laptop, then installed it to the “unsupported” Mac’s HD by using the laptop as the source machine.
Slow-my-azzz, Leopard runs as fast (if not FASTER) on the old dually than did Tiger.
Apple should have made the minimum requirement 867MHZ single processor or DUAL 800’s.
@John
I don’t find the site that badly designed, and all you have to do to get rid of the pop-ups is click off “don’t show pop-ups” in the browser preferences.
On the other hand, my Safari installation on Tiger crashes exactly *once* each day and it’s this web site that does it.
Every single day I click on this site and every single day Safari crashes instantly. After restarting, everything is fine, but the first click creates a crash so predictable I often do it *first* just to get it out of the way.
Other than “MDN crashes” though I haven’t crashed Safari for months.
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I shared in another thread yesterday that Leopard installs from the DVD fine onto my daughters emac sing an external DVD drive, but Tiger wouldn’t. Runs great.
Going to install it onto my old G4 400 Sawtooth today just for fun.
I have to agree with the comments about ads and pop ups on MDN. I frequently use an iPod touch to access the site, and it’s a pain in the ass to load. There’s got to be a better way to code this site.
My IIe is much snappier now.
Fortunately Apple allowed me to install iMovie 08 on my lowly Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8 even though the minimum spec on the box was a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0.
For those that have used Macs for a while, does Apple software typically install (without modifying the Installer package) only on machines that meet the minimum specs? Or does Apple typically allow software to be installed on machines that do not fully support the minimum spec’s (minor differences) as in the case of iLife 08?
Thanks in advance. Have a good weekend.
Peace.
Pop-up ads? What pop-up ads? I never get any and I have my pop-up blocker switched off on Safari
@Jeremy
I have the Block pop-up ads selected and I still get the damn things. I suspect that’s because they are pop-under ads.
And does anyone know what happened to the Fastclick solution to pop-unders? I cannot find it on their site.
Thanks Bob. I have a dual 800 G4 also.
USE FIREFOX + ADBLOCK.
bye bye ads.
Jeremey et. al.
I do blockup popups (or should I say pop unders) already, which is why MDNs popups flashing across my screen are particularly unwelcome. This site is slow and badly written. I should not have to suffer MDNs ads when I am in another space
How do you get a Performa 6115CD to eject a DVD?
I’ve already tried command-esc-shift-tab-e-j-dvd. Oh, and peanut butter. Smooth. Crunchy just makes it worse.
Booooooyaaaaahh!!!
Cubert will be all over this like Rosie O’Donnell on a plate of pancakes this weekend.
Long live the Cube and its measly 450 MHz processor! It still works WAY better than my HP 2.6 GHz P4 on XP SP2 that I am forced to use at work (and am typing on right now).
@Macromancer,
Check back with me on Monday.
I wonder how long until an automated software install is available like someone did for Tiger?
Sorry. Not doing all that Terminal crap. I’m going to try using an external hard drive to do it as detailed elsewhere. I think if I install on my PF (1.5 GHz), then make a disc image on a external drive and then attach that drive to my Cube, I should be able to install it.
I hope.
“It’s running fine on my PS3”
Dave, are you really running Leopard on a Playstation3? How did you do that?
Mauritius Kestrel,
Restart the computer.
Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the key combination Command-Option-O-F.
Release the keys when you see a white screen that says “Welcome to Open Firmware.”
At the prompt, type: eject cd
Press Return, then wait a few seconds. The disc drive should eject any disc that is present, and “ok” appears behind your command when the action is complete.
Type: mac-boot
Press Return.
Your computer should now start up normally.
I wonder if I can put Leopard on my SE-30? It runs fast and fine with NetBSD and System 7 now, but there’s so much to Leopard. It’s got a 16mHz 68030 processor with the ram maxed out at 8 mb. What do you think?
Happy Samhain…
Since we’ve corrupted this thread with browser/website complaints, I’ll add mine. This site takes forever to load on my iPhone. I get bad server messages. I have to reload the site several times to finally get it to load. And it can crash Safari.
Waaahhhh! I wanna install Leopard on my abacus.
Installed the newsgroup copy to see what it was like pending possible buying. Put it on my ibook g4 late 2004, which is supported just about.
Core image filters arent supported by the GPU so there was quite a bit of cpu load by WindowServer.
Left it running overnight and by the morning it had crashed (kernel panic i think, but display was off so couldn’t tell).
Tried to boot and it was painfully slow (like 10x normal boot time). Drive was having horrible IO errors everywhere. Basically leopard killed it, somehow.
I’m pissed off with Apple recently. Tiger was, and still is, great. Leopard has hardly anything worth upgrading for. Especially if it’s gonna involve killing your drive. Just glad I took a backup before I installed Leopard.
“Installed the newsgroup copy to see what it was like pending possible buying. Put it on my ibook g4 late 2004, “
have a real copy on a G4 iBook right now. faster than tiger, rock solid so far, multiple apps and windows in 2 spaces.
maybe your “newsgroup” copy has issues….
Jim, would you tell me how the G4 400 Mhz Sawtooth installation of Leopard goes this weekend? I’ve got one that I’d love to install Leopard on. It’s got a dvd burner and 1Gb of RAM so I think I ought to be alright – especially if it works on yours
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Thanks!!
I installed Leopard on my G4 Digital Audio (originally 433 mhz). I have upgraded the processor to 1.6 ghz powerpc, installed a dvd drive and upped the RAM to 1.5 GB (Tiger performs really well with this configuration).
The install went flawlessly. However, it seems that unless I purchase a $150 graphics card Leopard is useless. Very sluggish with my 16 mb of video ram. The Dock is very hesitant and the Time Machine interface will not even display. Looks like it’s back to Tiger for me.
Anyone interested in buying this G4 with Tiger installed ;-(
@Mauritius Kestrel
Try the old Paper Clip trick –
First try the normal methods to remove the disc.
Drag its icon to the Trash can in the Dock or select ‘Eject’ from the File menu.
Shut down the computer and start up whilst holding down the mouse button. This may take some time, but keep your finger on the mouse button right up until the disc comes out or the log-in screen has appeared.
If you have Toast Titanium installed on your computer, choose EJECT DISC from the menubar.
Sometimes you can successfully use the eject disc button in iTunes even if the disc is not visible to the Finder.
Open Disk Utility and choose the disc you wish to eject in the left-hand pane, then click on the Eject button.
Some Macintoshes have a paperclip hole that you can insert a straightened paperclip into, manually triggering the eject mechanism.
Open Terminal and type “drutil tray eject” to eject the disc/tray, and “drutil tray close” to close the tray.
Restart the computer while holding down Command-Option-O-F, to enter the Open Firmware prompt. Type “eject cd” without the quotes, and press return. The disk ought to eject.
To start into OS X, type “mac-boot” without the quotes. Press return, and the computer will continue with the startup.
is it possible to install leopard on a g4 733mhz quicksilver via an external usb drive?
For a no-nonsense solution, you can hook up a supported Mac, to a non-supported Mac, with a firewire cable, enter the non-supported Mac into target disc mode , and install the new OS onto the older Mac, as if it’s an external hard drive.
I haven’t tried this, but I can *cough* confirm *cough* that you can use this method to install a new OS onto another Mac, using the install disc that came with the newer Mac, even if that disc refuses to install onto the other computer otherwise.
Logic says that this should work for that too.
Anyone tried a G3 imac (~600 mHz)? I installed tiger via Firewire target mode. I’m curious if Leopard would even work
I really wouldn’t bother with a G3. Even Tiger really requires Alti-vec in order to work properly. You will notice a big difference between a machine with a 400 MHz G4 and a 350 G3 About twice, or greater, drawing speeds.
With Leopard, the G3 would be a disaster, even if it would work seemingly ok, which I’m not sure it would. Also, the video cards for G3’s are much too slow, have too little memory, and don’t have proper programmable GPU’s.
Don’t bother.
It’s time for eBay, or time to give Apple some money.
DogGone,
I say go for it. While I respect Mel Gross’ opinions (he posts copiously on AppleInsider and MacRumors) and his Mac knowledge, I say you’ve got nothing to lose. Make a good backup, do a clean install and try the target disc mode install as you did with Tiger.
My rationale? Two fold: You’ve got nothing to lose. Just revert back to Tiger by doing a clean install of it if you need to – your machine will probably even thank you for it. The second is that people who got Leopard up and running on a 400 MHz G4 say it works noticeably faster than Tiger. You might be saying the same thing, too.
Try it and let us know. Good Luck!
Cubert
I installed it yesterday on my 800MHz iBook G4 with 640MB RAM using the method outlined in the MDN link and have had no problems – while I agree with the decision that Apple made on where to draw the line for Leopard-supported Mac’s, I felt that my iBook was too new (and too damn close to 867MHz) to not take the plunge – I’m happy I did, but I did notice that it’s a little slower now – but nothing to complain about….
$_
Here’s how I did it on a stock G4-450 Cube.
http://www.cubeowner.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12992
There are easier ways like Firewire mode.
It runs fine but you really need more than a 16 meg video card to use some of the functions fully or at all.
Works pretty well on my lamp-iMac 700MHz with 768Mb RAM. Installed via firewire target mode with a PB12″ and overall time for the upgrade was about 2 hours.
Johannes Lund
and
Dave Powar
I”m curios on the ps3 solotion…