Beginner's problems with old hardware

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Eckard Brauer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> just subscribed to the list, and just reactivated an old Powerbook G4,
> only beacuse I noticed that Macports is around (usually I'm a Gentoo
> Linux user with only few *BSD background, so don't mind me stupid
> questions).
>
> Installing Ports on Sorbet Leopard went fine, but as everything (except
> App packages) is installed in /var/local, how is it possible to provide
> some of the system packages with fresh frameworks, most important, SSL?
> I'd need that for Mail (even TenFourBird doesn't work) and a working
> browser...

Is sorbet a special verson of Snow? :)

SSL provided by MacPorts works fine, but the issue is that "none" of the
apple-included apps will use it and work with it: no mail, no safari, no
command-line tools.
It is the advantage of MacPorts, it really sits aside your original
stuff, no breakage. Remove MacPorts and no harm will happen, but it's
the downside.
I think it is also very complicated to  update the system, besides the
new libraries (would be easy) you would need to convince Cocoa to
support the newer SSL.
I played with it a couple of years ago, ended breaking my system.

So the only alternative is using a proxy for connections, several people
succeeded, didn't try out yet.

Or you use other software, compiled from MacPorts or other sources
instead of the Apple one.

For Mail, if you have issues with TenFourBird, an alternative would be
GNUMail, on which I work myself. It can be tweaked to build against
MacPort's ssl. Ken did it with success, IIRC, but there is no package.

Browser is a sore point, on G5 there are several alternatives, all "a
bit there" and none ready.

- TenFourFox is your best bet - currently there are no ready binaries,
but 1) even the last you can find is better than anything else 2) you
can build it yourself, all dependencies are in MacPorts. I do build it.
However, I build for my G4.
- There was a very nice SeaMonkey port for 10.5 and G5, but it is dead,
I don't know what happened, perhaps the guy lost the computer and/or
interest.
- Arctic Fox. This is my own project, not as advanced as TFF, but more
portable. Help accepted! It works on 10.6. It works on Linux PPC. I have
patches to get it compile for Intel on 10.5, but it crashes during startup.
- There is a Safari backport... interesting tweak since it updates
system stuff.


Riccardo