Kaze's personal website serving as a museum of devices he collected over time Zola 2025-09-28T00:00:00+00:00 https://kaze.bigcats.cc/tags/powermac11-2/atom.xml 2025-09-28T00:00:00+00:00 2025-09-28T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://kaze.bigcats.cc/collections/computers/apple-powermac-g5/ <p>All I can say now, is that this machine is really frustrating to work with... when it is now an Apple Operating System running on it. My plans for it is to create the ultimate Unix workstation, powered by a BSD of some sort but everything gets in the way. Stay tuned!</p> <h2 id="the-2026-update">The 2026 update</h2> <p>I recently turned on the computer after a long time being tossed aside. It currently runs on Mac OS 10.5.9 Leopard. I managed to install Aquafox but that's pretty much it.</p> <p>Most of the time, when I try to boot another operating system, I end up stuck on a black screen, with the fans spinning full blast. This means the CPU felt into a trap and the system cannot adjust fan speed to CPU temperature, so it just put those at max speed to avoid any thermal issues. Not great.</p> <h2 id="the-video-card-situation">The video card situation</h2> <p>The biggest hurdle I encountered with the machine is regarding the video card. It came with an Nvidia 6600LE that works great! It even have support great support on Linux! But on xBSD? Good luck with that. It seems really hard to have an open-source Nvidia driver on BSD-land for this card, especially an PPC64 one! No problem, I told myself, the Mac is equipped with PCI-Express slots! I tried old ATI/AMD graphic cards like the Radeon HD 4850 (I have the stock Saphire one) but no luck. I tried more recent cards too, still the same result.</p> <p>The main issue is that the card contains a bit of X86 assembly into it, that let the BIOS of an Intel/AMD computer to initialize the graphic card. Since this assembly part is not made for PowerPC, the Mac cannot initialize the GPU. In theory, it's not as big of a deal because when the operating system starts, the driver would take over and initialize the card properly. In reality, it means that the framebuffer is not available and so it's not possible to verify if the process go further than OpenFirmware. The end result is that I never get an image, and usually I cannot Ping/SSH the machine. To me, it seems like the boot process hang somewhere before the OpenFirmware transfer the control to a booted OS. Since there's no PPC Nvidia drivers on FreeBSD and that I cannot boot with any other ATI/AMD card, it seems a dead end for that 'Ultimate Unix Workstation' unfortunately. The best I seem to go on *BSD is the terminal. At least on Linux, I have a graphical output!</p> <h2 id="specs">Specs</h2> <ul> <li>IBM PowerPC 970MP @ 2.3GHz</li> <li>4gb of DDR2</li> <li>Nvidia 6600 LE with 128mb of VRAM</li> <li>No hard drive</li> <li>DVD Burner</li> </ul>