Recently, being on holiday and all, I had the time to upgrade an old Powerbook G4. One of those 12″ ones, that were basically netbooks before the whole craze started. It was running some old old version on 10.3, which was probably pretty state of the art in those days, and still isn’t that bad. But it’s just plain crazy with no Spotlight and trackpad gestures (partly a hardware thing…). A little bit crazy how much I use some of these features…
But anyway, as it was a PowerPC machine (G4 1GHz – retro times indeed!) the furthest I could upgrade it was Leopard, which was pretty good. And going back to using it temporarily doesn’t seem that bad at all, in fact it’s pretty similar to Snow Leopard (obviously), except a little slower. Not bad for an old Powerbook! I thought it was best to do a massive erase (sadly not a 35 pass erase – however fun it looked) and install of the system, which meant that all the applications went walkies. But one thing that I figured out, that might be of use to some people (and this is actually the crux of this post) is that when installing iLife, I could do it (via Pacifist of course) with a new Intel MacBook Pro DVD. Crazy huh? For all the hype of not having Snow Leopard run on PPC machines, the included versions of iLife on the DVD are Universal Binary. That’s gonna change soon I guess. But anyway, that’s what I found out, and I was pretty happy that it worked. Would have been pretty irritating if it didn’t work as I don’t have a clue where to get a PPC iLife ’09 other than the actual standalone product…
But all is good, and all works well so far. Mission accomplished.
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