Mac OS X Leopard on a First Generation iMac G4

Officially, this is not supported. Mac OS X Leopard will only install on a PowerPC G4 system that is approximately 867 MHz or faster. However, I recently came into an iMac G4 that is 700 MHz, so it would seem I’m cut off. Right?

Nope!

I managed to install Leopard on my iMac G4 and it runs just as smoothly as the latest version of Tiger. How did I do it? I found a list of steps elsewhere on the internets that I’ve refined and will share here.

Step 1: Create a Leopard DVD Disk Image

I imaged my retail copy of Leopard using Apple’s own Disk Utility that comes with OS X. I had read to do this, and I did it, but I suspect you may get away with skipping this step. If you want to be safe, go ahead and create an image.

Step 2: Find a USB Stick

If you have a USB stick, great. My iMac G4 only has a CD-ROM drive, so I can’t use the Leopard DVD. In fact, like the previous step, you may be able to skip this if your computer has a DVD-ROM. However, these are the steps I took, and it’s pretty cool to boot off a USB, so you can still do this if only for the fun of it.

What you’ll want to do is format your USB stick and make sure you put an Apple Partition Map on it by going into the formatting options. Presumably this enables the USB stick to boot.

Step 3: The Terminal

After I formatted my USB stick, I was then instructed to enable owners on it. I’m not entirely sure this is necessary, but it’s painless to do. Better safe than sorry.

Open the Terminal and enter the following command: sudo vsdbutil -a /Volumes/device

You may be required to enter a root password.

Step 4: The Clone!

Again, if your computer has a DVD-ROM and you have a copy of Leopard, these steps up until now may not be neccesary. Otherwise, the next step here is to clone that image you made (or clone the DVD directly) onto the USB stick.

I was made aware of some software called Carbon Copy Cloner which is free to use. It’s also pretty straightforward to use. Just make sure you check the option to erase destination files on the USB stick before cloning.

Step 5: The Moment of Truth

Whatever your intended method has been so far, this is where it all comes together. Put your DVD in your DVD-ROM, or your USB stick in a port, and reboot your Mac. Keep the Control+Option+O+F keys all firmly pressed until you enter the Open Firmware screen.

The point here is to trick Leopard’s installer into thinking your computer is a 867 MHz or faster machine. Also, if booting from USB, it’s entirely possible that your Mac doesn’t natively boot from USB… but it is capable.

These are the commands I entered:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int ” clock-frequency” property
boot usb1/disk:3,\\:tbxi

If you’re going to attempt booting from a DVD, you won’t need to enter that third command. That just forces the Mac to boot from USB… you won’t want that. usb1 may not work for you, either. It depends on which USB port you’re booting from. It could be usb0, usb2, etc. Keep that in mind.

With any luck, the machine will boot the installer, and it will be none the wiser. The only problem you may encounter is the slow speed at which it installs. On my 700 MHz iMac G4, it took just under 4 hours. Worth it, though!

A tale of good versus evil

So I was surfing around last night, like I usually do, when an odd window appeared. It was one of those popups designed to look like a real application window, and in this case, it had a bunch of made-up visuals on it designed to make me think that it was an antivirus scanner, and that it had found a bunch of junk on my computer. It called itself “Antivirus System PRO”, and I immediately recognized it as bullshit, and closed the window. Then I noticed something else odd: it had stuck an icon in the taskbar tray, down by the clock. No fake app popup I’ve ever seen can do that. And that’s when it started to take over.

Clicking or right-clicking on the taskbar tray icon merely re-displayed the window I’d closed earlier. Fine, I’ll start Task Manager and kill it that way. Except a Ctrl-Shift-Esc didn’t open Task Manager, it opened an error window saying that taskmgr.exe was infected, and it had been blocked from starting. Fine, time to consult Google on how to get rid of it. I had Chrome open, and Ctrl-T’d to open a new tab. Except I got the same error window again, this time saying that chrome.exe was infected. Ok, I’ll just re-use an already-open tab to get to Google. I’m instead re-directed to a page explaining that that link has been blocked, and I’m offered a link to purchase the “full” version of Antivirus System PRO in order to remove the problem.

I do a Windows+R to get the Run box, with the intent to start cmd.exe to see if maybe there’s a command-line way of killing this thing. cmd.exe gets blocked by the same error window as before. Attempting to start other browsers also doesn’t work. Ok, I know that Internet Explorer is integrated into Windows Explorer, so if I open a Windows Explorer window, I can just type a web URL into the address bar, and bam, I’m surfing. It lets me open a Windows Explorer window, but entering any link in the address bar takes me back to the page I mentioned before. The page that I’m redirected to, bizarrely, says it’s on microsoft.com — all part of the ruse, no doubt.

Fine, you piece of shit. You may be on this computer, but you’re not on the computer a room away. I start that one up, search a bit, and find out that Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware can get rid of this thing. It so happens I have that installed on the infected computer, but of course, I can’t start it because it just gets blocked like any other program I try to run. So I restart into safe mode, update Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, and run it. It finds and nukes the bastard into oblivion.

It’s at this part that I start to think, and I start to get infuriated.

First, how did the thing get on my computer to begin with?

I used to believe that when people said that they got a virus, and that they didn’t download, install, or run anything suspicious to get it, they were delusional or mistaken or just plain lying. But that’s exactly my situation here: I was literally just surfing around, not running anything out of the ordinary, not visiting any sites out of the ordinary, when the bloody thing just showed up and took over.

But what infuriates me more than being a “power user” and still getting outfoxed by malware is that someone made this malware.

See, in our day and age, software is so widely and easily available that we take it for granted that people make it. We just go to a web page, click a link, install, and run. But it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Somebody made that software, and put it up on that web page for you to download.

So, as far as malware goes, it isn’t some rogue program that appeared out of thin air one day and started spreading. Somebody made it. Which means that somebody sat down and decided to make it; they thought about this thing, and planned out, and then created, all of the awful things that it does. Using computers as a means, someone made the conscious decision to hurt other people. That bothers me.

What bothers me more, though, is how readily I was steered to a page where I could buy myself out of this bullshit. In other words, not only did someone make the decision to create software that would maliciously take over other people’s computers, they thought up a way that they could make money off of it.

And not everybody is as resourceful as me. Not everybody has access to another computer that they could use to bail themselves out. Plenty of people out there would be totally helpless against this thing, and would be absolutely forced into paying to get rid of it. Which means that at some point, someone realized the potential of this helplessness… and so they decided to make some software that would allow them to profit from that helplessness. That bothers me.

But what bothers me most, though? It most likely wasn’t built by just one person. And the people that built it were likely paid by someone else to build it. That means that multiple people were involved in creating something designed to exploit the weaknesses of others, and nobody said no. Nobody stood up and said “hey, this doesn’t seem right, maybe we shouldn’t be making this”. Or maybe they did, and they got fired, and replaced by someone that would comply. Regardless, the software was completed, released, and now the participants can sit back and pretend that the rich ends justify the unscrupulous means.

But ultimately, they don’t get to win. For all of the bad that these selfish assholes can come up with, there’s people that make software like Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. People that decided to use their powers for good; people that sit around all day and use their brains to squash the assholes. And then, on top of the altruism that comes along with creating such software, they give their software away for free. It’s the sort of thing that can restore one’s faith in the race.

Twitter

Twitter is an awesome tool if you can figure out how it works best for you. I had an account for almost a year and I never used it because I found it too cumbersome to actually go to Twitter.com to stay current with who I was following, and post my own tweets.

The last few months I’ve become much more interested in it simply due to the existence of client desktop apps that you can run 24/7 and keeps you updated with all the latest tweets from your followers and allows you to tweet your own tweets. Tweet. Tweeeeet.

Ahem.

There are a number of these client apps, but the one I settled on is called Twhirl. It runs on the Adobe Air platform and works on Windows and Mac OS X. I wholly recommend giving it a whirl. Get it? Twhirl. Whirl.

Yes, I went there.

Another good Twitter client that I have tried out, but never continued using for reasons that have escaped me, is Destroy Twitter. It has a very slick UI and seems to be just as good, if not better than Twhirl.

I came across Twhirl first and I like sticking with what works, but go ahead and try out whatever you come across. The point is to get Twitter working for you, because it’s one of those things that works better and better the more people use it.

You can, of course, follow me on Twitter. Tweet you later!

Website image capture software for OS X.

A while back I was looking for some software that could capture and save a web page to image. I came across a piece of freeware for OS X called Paparazzi which does exactly that — it takes a screenshot of an entire web page from top to bottom and allows you to save it to JPG, PNG, PDF, or TIFF.

Unfortunately, Paparazzi looks to be a bit outdated. The last update on the site was made in 2006 and the software itself is listed as supporting OS X 10.3 and higher. However it still works great, and I won’t discount the credibility and usefulness of a piece of software just because it’s older. It does what I need it to do.

Here’s nomgeek as an example. Keep in mind Flickr shrunk the image. Paparazzi does save in full size.

If anybody knows of any free software that’s more up to date and does the same thing, I’d love to know about it.

Paintbrush for Mac OS X

There are a few things that bother me about Apple and OS X. I’ve been a Mac user for almost three years, coming from a long history of Windows use. There were certain things I was used to having in a default installation of Windows. I’m not talking about those superficial things that most OS fanboys get caught up in arguing about. I’m talking about things that should be standard across all operating systems.

It goes both ways. There are things standard in Windows that I think should definitely be in OS X, and vise versa. One of those things is a standard, simple paint application. Something you can knock out a drawing in without dropping hundreds of dollars and wasting precious system resources on bloated software you’ll never use.

If Apple aren’t going to include it, fine. Surely there’s something out there that will suffice? Well, I found it. In only a matter of seconds, too. I’m amazed I found it so quickly, because I would thought I’d have found it long ago.

Paintbrush is exactly what I think Apple should include in OS X. And it’s exactly what I was looking for. It’s simple, it’s lightweight, and best of all it’s free. I’m a bit of a software junkie when it comes to OS X, and I really love when I find free stuff. Especially free stuff that’s really awesome.

The other thing that really bothers me about OS X is that all it comes with is Chess.app as far as games go. I know that as Mac users we’re supposed to be intellectual, creative, arty farty types who’d love the smell of Einstein’s shit, but… I’m still positive there are only two Mac users in existence who actually know how to play the damn game.

And now that got on the subject of games, I might as well share a game for OS X that I found a couple months ago. It’s called Quinn. What’s Quinn? It’s “A Tetromino Game for Mac OS X.”

…that means Tetris.

How to painlessly set up MySQL and PHP.

I’ll warn you, if you’re a purist you might as well stop reading this now. Not that what I’m about to tell you is really all that bad, it’s just for people who want a quick and easy way to set up PHP and MySQL.

And all you need to know is one thing… what platform are you using?

If you’re on Windows, all you need is a little sumthin’ called EasyPHP. If you’re on Mac OS X, then what you want is MAMP. Sorry for those of you on Linux since I don’t know of any equivalents at the moment, but chances are if you are on Linux you would have stopped at my first sentence anyway.

What these two applications offer is a way to set up a fully functional local (as in on your computer) server running PHP and MySQL without actually having to do all the grunt work that is necessary to run PHP and MySQL normally. Just install and boom, you’re in business.

Of course, you’ll still need to know where to put your website files and how to access them in your browser, which I trust you’re smart enough to figure out. If not, those websites should have ample documentation to get you by.