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> You need Mac OS X 10.6.6 to run it. sigh. No joy for PPC users, again. This is a huge part of why I'm not sticking with Apple hardware again once I replace m

> You need Mac OS X 10.6.6 to run it. sigh. No joy for PPC users, again. This is a huge part of why I'm not sticking with Apple hardware again once I replace my laptop.

thurn 16y ago
Personally, I tend to think that an overly dogmatic commitment to backwards compatibility does more harm than the benefit produced by supporting a tiny minority of users with five year old hardware. Backward compatibility is the enemy of elegance. Just look at C++ or the x86 instruction set to see examples of that.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  I do agree to some extent. On the other hand, I've been using Apple hardware off-and-on again since the MC68030; I already went through this with the 68k->PPC transition, then again with the introduction of the PPC750 series processors, then again with the PPC->Intel transition. At this point, I fully expect that if I were to buy an Intel series Apple system in the next couple of years, shortly afterward Apple would switch everything over to their new A-series hardware. I have certain investments in my current development system, too, like the early-model SSD that has made it possible for me to haul this thing around in the car to client appointments every day for the last couple of years. I'm just sick of having perfectly good hardware that gets aged out of being able to run text editors. Yesterday, I discovered I can't run pianobar (easily) anymore because the Pandora protocol changed, MacPorts appears to be dead, and homebrew is Intel-only. (There is a PPC fork of the Intel version of homebrew, but the documentation for it is all pulled directly from the Intel fork, and I'm completely stumped at how to actually get it to work.) On top of all that, I get to enjoy the economics of owning a device whose secondary market is falling off a cliff. Anybody's welcome to point out all the benefits of this kind of situation -- the longevity of Apple hardware, the supposed lower TCO -- or the fact that I should be budgeting a certain amount every year towards new hardware anyway, but it's not likely to change the fact that I've been through this one too many times now and it's just not something that, to me, is worth continuing to hassle with.
  - daxelrod 16y ago
    I hope I'm not veering too far offtopic, but I've gotten the Homebrew PPC fork working, what problem are you having?
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      Sweet! I'm completely unfamiliar with Ruby, which I think is half the problem (edit: and git/github, which is probably the other half). If there's a different file(s) to download for that fork, I can't find them -- everything in the github project seems to link back to https://gist.github.com/323731 https://gist.github.com/323731, which is the Intel build (edit: e.g., the Readme.md file). I tried replacing my copy of brew with https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew, but that complained that it can't find brew.h ("no such file to load -- brew.h" on line 77) ... at that point, I decided that I'd spent too much time trying to get pianobar upgraded and moved on to other things.
      - daxelrod 16y ago
        Here's what I did: First, get the latest version of Xcode that's compatible with your OS. You can find older versions of Xcode by clicking on "Developer Tools" on the right side of this page: http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/downloads http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/w... (you may need a free Apple developer account). sceaga has a branch for Tiger and another branch for PPC, I happened to be using Tiger on PPC, so I picked the Tiger branch. From https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew , you want to click "Switch Branches" on the left, choose your branch, then click "Download on the right. Or, just click one of these: https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/powerpc https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/powerpc https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/tiger https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/tiger I opted to install into my home directory, rather than /usr/local, so to get it into place, all I had to do was extract the tarball, put the resulting directory where I wanted it (I called it "brew"), and then add $HOME/brew/bin and $HOME/brew/sbin to my $PATH. If you want it in /usr/local, see the instructions at https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation , but in the "curl" line, replace their URL with the one you picked above. You should now be able to type "brew" and see its usage message. At this point, "brew install" worked for me, except that it wasn't chmodding binaries as executable. At the end of installations, it was giving a bunch of messages like "file: invalid option -- h". This appears to be because my 10.4 PPC version of "file" doesn't support "-h". To fix this, I installed the gnu version instead: brew install libmagic chmod +x ~/brew/Cellar/libmagic/5.04/bin/file brew link libmagic #libmagic doesn't add gnu "file" to your PATH without this command, because it doesn't want to override the OS-provided "file" After that, homebrew seems to work, with the following caveats: 1. "brew update" (which updates the package manager itself) will try to update from the non-PPC, upstream version of homebrew. I just don't use this command. 2. "brew doctor" complains that my gcc is too old (because I can't use the latest Xcode) and can't seem to detect that I have X11 installed, even though I do. I've also found the people in #machomebrew on irc.freenode.net to be a helpful bunch, although not many have experience with homebrew on PPC. Let me know how it goes!
- krobertson 16y ago
  One of the things I like best about Apple vs Microsoft is Apple is willing to taper off compatibility. Microsoft won't.
kgtm 16y ago
But there is no notion of "Apple hardware" anymore. Apple has been using the "PC architecture" for quite a few years. You can run Mac OS on "PC" hardware just fine if you wish. Many people have done / are doing this; see www.hackint0sh.org for more information.

> You need Mac OS X 10.6.6 to run it. sigh. No joy for PPC users, again. This is a huge part of why I'm not sticking with Apple hardware again once I replace my laptop.

thurn 16y ago

Personally, I tend to think that an overly dogmatic commitment to backwards compatibility does more harm than the benefit produced by supporting a tiny minority of users with five year old hardware. Backward compatibility is the enemy of elegance. Just look at C++ or the x86 instruction set to see examples of that.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
I do agree to some extent. On the other hand, I've been using Apple hardware off-and-on again since the MC68030; I already went through this with the 68k->PPC transition, then again with the introduction of the PPC750 series processors, then again with the PPC->Intel transition. At this point, I fully expect that if I were to buy an Intel series Apple system in the next couple of years, shortly afterward Apple would switch everything over to their new A-series hardware. I have certain investments in my current development system, too, like the early-model SSD that has made it possible for me to haul this thing around in the car to client appointments every day for the last couple of years. I'm just sick of having perfectly good hardware that gets aged out of being able to run text editors. Yesterday, I discovered I can't run pianobar (easily) anymore because the Pandora protocol changed, MacPorts appears to be dead, and homebrew is Intel-only. (There is a PPC fork of the Intel version of homebrew, but the documentation for it is all pulled directly from the Intel fork, and I'm completely stumped at how to actually get it to work.) On top of all that, I get to enjoy the economics of owning a device whose secondary market is falling off a cliff. Anybody's welcome to point out all the benefits of this kind of situation -- the longevity of Apple hardware, the supposed lower TCO -- or the fact that I should be budgeting a certain amount every year towards new hardware anyway, but it's not likely to change the fact that I've been through this one too many times now and it's just not something that, to me, is worth continuing to hassle with.
- daxelrod 16y ago
  I hope I'm not veering too far offtopic, but I've gotten the Homebrew PPC fork working, what problem are you having?
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    Sweet! I'm completely unfamiliar with Ruby, which I think is half the problem (edit: and git/github, which is probably the other half). If there's a different file(s) to download for that fork, I can't find them -- everything in the github project seems to link back to https://gist.github.com/323731 https://gist.github.com/323731, which is the Intel build (edit: e.g., the Readme.md file). I tried replacing my copy of brew with https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew, but that complained that it can't find brew.h ("no such file to load -- brew.h" on line 77) ... at that point, I decided that I'd spent too much time trying to get pianobar upgraded and moved on to other things.
    - daxelrod 16y ago
      Here's what I did: First, get the latest version of Xcode that's compatible with your OS. You can find older versions of Xcode by clicking on "Developer Tools" on the right side of this page: http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/downloads http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/w... (you may need a free Apple developer account). sceaga has a branch for Tiger and another branch for PPC, I happened to be using Tiger on PPC, so I picked the Tiger branch. From https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew , you want to click "Switch Branches" on the left, choose your branch, then click "Download on the right. Or, just click one of these: https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/powerpc https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/powerpc https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/tiger https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/tarball/tiger I opted to install into my home directory, rather than /usr/local, so to get it into place, all I had to do was extract the tarball, put the resulting directory where I wanted it (I called it "brew"), and then add $HOME/brew/bin and $HOME/brew/sbin to my $PATH. If you want it in /usr/local, see the instructions at https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation , but in the "curl" line, replace their URL with the one you picked above. You should now be able to type "brew" and see its usage message. At this point, "brew install" worked for me, except that it wasn't chmodding binaries as executable. At the end of installations, it was giving a bunch of messages like "file: invalid option -- h". This appears to be because my 10.4 PPC version of "file" doesn't support "-h". To fix this, I installed the gnu version instead: brew install libmagic chmod +x ~/brew/Cellar/libmagic/5.04/bin/file brew link libmagic #libmagic doesn't add gnu "file" to your PATH without this command, because it doesn't want to override the OS-provided "file" After that, homebrew seems to work, with the following caveats: 1. "brew update" (which updates the package manager itself) will try to update from the non-PPC, upstream version of homebrew. I just don't use this command. 2. "brew doctor" complains that my gcc is too old (because I can't use the latest Xcode) and can't seem to detect that I have X11 installed, even though I do. I've also found the people in #machomebrew on irc.freenode.net to be a helpful bunch, although not many have experience with homebrew on PPC. Let me know how it goes!
krobertson 16y ago
One of the things I like best about Apple vs Microsoft is Apple is willing to taper off compatibility. Microsoft won't.

kgtm 16y ago

But there is no notion of "Apple hardware" anymore. Apple has been using the "PC architecture" for quite a few years. You can run Mac OS on "PC" hardware just fine if you wish. Many people have done / are doing this; see www.hackint0sh.org for more information.