Looking for a solution to compile MacPorts and maintain my packages

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 1, 2009, at 15:06, Toby Peterson wrote:

> On Jul 1, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Jean-Michel Pouré wrote:
>
>> Finally I bought a dual processor Powermac G4 for 99€:
>> http://cgi.ebay.fr/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260437468424
>>
>> It comes with Mac OS X 10.4, but I will try to upgrade it to 10.5.  
>> Then
>> I will start compiling and try to chase bugs under PowerMac.
>
> Getting Leopard running on that machine will be quite an adventure...

I have Leopard working on my 466-MHz Power Mac G4. So that's a  
generation or two newer than the 450-MHz G4 Jean-Michel bought. I  
used LeopardAssist [1] to bypass the 867-MHz Leopard installer check.

There are a number of issues. Leopard assumes you have a graphics  
card at least as new as the 867-MHz Power Mac G4 it requires as a  
minimum, so on a lesser machine, there are some graphics glitches.  
The DVD player is useless unless you copy over the graphics drivers  
for your graphics card from a Tiger installation. And of course these  
are very slow machines we're talking about, by today's standards.  
Some of the larger ports take mine days to compile. I have mine set  
up exclusively to help me fix PowerPC-specific issues I encounter in  
MacPorts; thankfully those are rare. I would not want to use it as a  
primary development machine.

I don't read French so I couldn't tell if your G4 is a single- or  
dual-processor model. If dual, you'll want to enable multiple  
simultaneous build jobs to speed things up. In /opt/local/etc/ 
macports/macports.conf, set build_make_jobs to the number of  
simultaneous jobs you want (which some people recommend setting to  
either the number of processors or cores you have available, or one  
greater than that number). Set build_make_jobs to 0 and MacPorts will  
determine the number of processors or cores you have available and  
use that number of jobs.


[1] http://www.mac.profusehost.net/leopardassist/