PowerMac G5 arrived

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Connected it to a monitor. The mouse and keyboard cables are pretty short. Also wasn't able to connect to the company lan. It apparently is on the network but maybe it can't connect to the domain or something.

Machine feels pretty quick and it was very esy to get up and running.

Packaging was very good too in that you don't need two people to unpack it.

A few questions:

- How do you get back to the network setup screen?
- I noticed that you couldn't su using your setup password. What's the supervisor password on these machines?
- I was able to sudo though I don't really know if it did what I expected to do based on the output.

TIA
 
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Got the network up and running on the corp network. Downloaded a G4-Optimized Firefox from Powerbook and am up and running with that. I'm looking around for a G5-Optimized version but can live with G4 for now. If I don't find one, I'll get started on building one.

Everything has been pretty easy to set up except for my network problem but I just had to find the right setup screen for that. Microsoft scroll mouse working well. Will run a performance test just to get a baseline compared to Windows.
 
T

Thud

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mmoy said:
Got the network up and running on the corp network. Downloaded a G4-Optimized Firefox from Powerbook and am up and running with that. I'm looking around for a G5-Optimized version but can live with G4 for now. If I don't find one, I'll get started on building one.

Everything has been pretty easy to set up except for my network problem but I just had to find the right setup screen for that. Microsoft scroll mouse working well. Will run a performance test just to get a baseline compared to Windows.


Cool, I'll be interested to what performance tests you run. I have a pretty similar Athlon64 system as well (oc'd to 2.25GHz).

Also, the root account is disabled by default, but you have administrator rights. The only thing you can't do is directly modify system files. I wouldn't recommend enabling the root account until you need it for some reason.

Try Shiira for web browsing... Firefox is very slow, even the optimized builds. Firefox just sucks on the mac-- it's lightning quick on my A64 though.
Shiira uses the same rendering/parsing engine as Safari (so it's 100% compatible with Safari) and it has some features that Safari lacks, plus it's very quick.
 
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Hmmm. I thought I answered but it appears that it didn't show up. IE was 55 seconds.
FF and Safari were in the 39 to 44 second area. The tests are at 24fun.com.

I've seen Mac Mini reports of 13 seconds but don't know what they did to boost the performance so much.
 
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Thud

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Well that's just testing the javascript speed, which may or may not have much to do with the browser's rendering speed and such...

But on my mini, here are my scores:

Shiira = 40.64 seconds

Safari = 42.17 seconds

Camino = 11.64 seconds

Wow. For general surfing though, Shiira still seems faster. Camino clearly has better javascript processing speed though.



Now, on my A64 Windows XP box:
IE6 = 7.34 seconds
Firefox 1.0.1 = 6.91 seconds


I actually thought IE6 would be faster on the windows box. But both browsers scored five times faster than Safari on OSX. Something ain't right with Safari. The Camino score was more in line with what I'd expect given the difference in processor power, so I think Safari has a very inefficient javascript processor (which is also shared by Shiira).

Camino is also a Mozilla foundation browser and it shows that they're getting some pretty good performance in their browsers.
 
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Those test do test rendering as well as you have to render to display the results. I've put trace information in various routines and there is a lot more than just Javascript testing going on.

I like Firefox on Windows and would rather have portability. I also have various extensions that I'd like to preserve from platform to platform. We'll see what we can do about making Firefox faster on the Mac.
 

dtravis7


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Your Mac's Specs
MacMini M-1 MacOS Monterey, iMac 2010 27"Quad I7 , MBPLate2011, iPad Pro10.5", iPhoneSE
Tried it on my Mini with 512 Megs RAM and 1.25Ghz CPU. With Safari it was very slow, 78.53. It's the 1st test that is doing it too, all the others are quite fast. BUT then I tried Camino Optimized for a G4 and get 12.1!! That is as fast or faster than my 2.53GHZ P4 with 1Gig ram and AIW Radeon. So if you want speed at least with what that set of benchmarks stress, Get an Optimized build of Camino for your Mac.

What I don't understand about the Safari bench is that I have run Safari Speed up and with most pages I saw a noticible difference.
 
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I built my own G5 optimized Firefox with one of my
performance patches over the weekend. My first
Windows build took about two weeks so I'd say that
things went more smoothly on the Mac. There's
a package called FINK that I had to install and this
appears to be a set of development tools similar to
cygwin.

Also grabbed a bunch of PowerPC architecture
documents off of the freescale site (they are a
spinoff of Motorola) that makes PowerPC
processors. I'll be reading up on PowerPC
instructions and AltiVec instructions in the near
term.

And I grabbed some music off an external USB 2.0
hard drive. It went fairly smoothly. I tried to copy
my homepage files off the disk to the Mac but it
couldn't see the directory. I created a new directory
using Windows and moved some of the files to
the new directory and was able to copy those files
to the Mac.

The desktop is very nice. The machine is slower
than my Windows laptop but it is quite nice to use.
Spent a lot of time in the terminal window doing
the build and OSX feels a lot like Linux though
I wish that they included the X server software
by default instead of putting it on the CD-ROM.

This machine is really the family machine and I
should try not to monopolize it.
 
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I just had a chat with my coworker that bought a Mini recently. He tried to install YellowDog Linux on it and it had a problem with some device and he was talking to the folks at YellowDog to try to get it fixed.He also tried installing Mandrake on the Mini as well. It appears that Linux vendors are jumping on the Apple PowerPC bandwagon to ride Linus' coattails.

He didn't like the el cheapo monitor that he had so he upgraded to a 20 inch cinema. I told him that he's probably the only one out there with a Mini and a 20-inch cinema display. Then he told me that he bought a Dual G5 2.5 Ghz with 2.5 GB of memory,
gigabit ethernet, 160 GB + an additional 250 GB BlueTooth and a bunch of other stuff.

He's been playing around with various operating systems. I think he's going back to OSX on the Mini and he likes OSX and the Mac GUI quite a bit. He's had friends telling him about Macs for a long time and now he's jumped in with both feet.
 

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