cbevis

Hey there....

Been reading this forum off an on trying to figure some things out...bare with me please...I'm not that savy with this Mac stuff yet.

I recently picked up an old PowerPC G4 from work. It was one of our older machines and they were just going to toss it...so I brought it home instead. I got to thinking about making it a MacCarputer and wanted to get yall's opinions. 733MHz, and 384 MB SDRAM....it ain't much I know (i've got a couple slotts open for more RAM). I'm just wondering if there's maybe an older front end that'll work on something this small/slow. I'm really only interested in running i-tunes for now...

Seems all the recent front ends that have been created need more machine to work well.

Bugbyte

Hmmm....not sure about that. It may work fine as a car PC. Try adding some memory, upgrade it to OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and run Amp on it.

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cbevis

I'll give it shot....are there any decent front ends for something this old?

Jirka Jirout

I used to run TatraApp for several years on an old G4/450MHz with 512MB RAM.

cbevis

Yeah? Is that still around or did you full out replace it with QCar?

Jirka Jirout

TatraApp has been discontinued in 2006, but I can dig up the last version and put it somewhere for download.

cbevis

really? That'd be great man, thanks! I have to assume there's a tutorial in the forum somewhere on how to set it up properly...I'll give it a search after work.

'preciate ya!

iamgnat

CarFrontEnd should work just fine (though I would upgrade the RAM) if you load 10.4 on it. It doesn't do anything processor intensive so 733 should be plenty (I have run it on our old dual 800 G4 with 1.5GB of RAM with no issues).

-dave

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cbevis

you know...I tried CarFrontEnd and nothing happened for me....The application appears to decompress and install fine but when I go to open it, it will appear on the Dock for two seconds and close right away.....

Truth be told...I'm not really sure what needs to be done after the initial installation. Like I said...I'm new to this stuff. The down load I used was from the sticky in this forum...do I need an authorization?

I've got the whole weekend to myself, I'll make myself useful and search for some "how to's"

cbevis

Probably has to do with my machine running 10.3.9 huh....sigh....I must absorb replies, not just read them...

I'll find a webernet connection and update....I wonder how Leopard would run on this pig....maybe I'll bring it home with me and find out...

iamgnat

I do the same thing, don't feel bad. I'll look into the installer though as I didn't think it would allow an install on sub 10.4.


I never noticed much difference between 10.3 and 10.4 as far as performance goes, though if you dump a lot of files on your disk at once Spotlight will eat up all your CPU chugging through it. 10.5, on the other hand, I would not recommend.

-dave

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NeonDev

10.4 should actually be faster in most cases. especially in booting.

10.4s launchd is so much better and more efficient than 10.3s init, initd, rc, about 10 more processes... definitely go to 10.4 I/the company I work for had 10.4 on all its macs even the old "sawtooth" g4s we now run 10.5 but we finally dumped the old g4s and now only have g5s and up

also, what (aside from the os) makes all the current FEs unacceptable on old hardware? using the qt framework (pretty sure all FEs use that wether directly or indirectly through itunes) to decode music/video takes just as much cpu no matter what program is doing it...

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TTeuer

You can't run Leopard on anything less than 867MHz G4 anyway so that's out of the question. I'd go with 10.4 - it's much more supported, stable, and faster than 10.3 was.