March 18th 2022
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2022 11:24 pm
Today my youngest son became a teenager (my next eldest turned 23 yesterday, a 10 year + 1 day gap), I feel like that's an important milestone for me. In other Fam news, my Mom is doing much better, now living at my sister's, whom she is moving in with permanently... As a result my car is full of boxes and items from helping clean out my mom's senoir apartment which I need to store (temporarily!), which has a ripple effect of forcing me to clean out my garage again.
About once or twice a decade or so, I try to do some serious cleaning up in my "man-cave" areas. The garage is the major concern as that is where my Bass Guitar is! It's also where, for a good 10 years or so, I had built-up something of a computer support / repair / rebuilding / scrapping operation, mostly no-cost tech support, mostly for friends and family. I've accumulated many spare computer components during that time span (in addition to a few computer antiques, such as a Commodore VIC-20, that I'm keeping as collector items). My wife thinks I've become a "Hoarder", but I am trying to fix that now. For the most part, I've been done with most of that activity more than five years ago, and now that "Hackintosh" is nearing End-Of-Life, I see even less point to keeping all of this, mostly 10-15yr old junk around. Which is where this gets relevant to OXT...
Hoarder or not, I do like having at least one working computer setup in my Garage... for a quick recording session or a quick bit of retro-arcade gaming. So I decided to do one last final LGA 775/Socket T HacPro build using up the best of the parts I have laying around and recycling the rest. This meant testing and researching the parts, mount the drive to determine if there's any old data on HDDs that I want to back up first, and things like that. This all makes cleaning out my garage take MUCH longer than it should, but it also makes it a much more enjoyable process!
So I picked out the best, generic PC tower case of the bunch (sending 5+ other PCs for metals recycling), and then dropped in the motherboard from a Dell Studio 540, which I believe is a "Pennryn" era chipset (Intel ICH10 SATA controller) from about 2008/09 (the very end of the "Core 2" era), mostly because it had 4 RAM slots (but no 40-pin IDE support
). Added NVIdia GT240 1GB graphics card, 4x2GB (8GB) DDR2 DIMMS and set about rebuilding. I had forgotten what a pain in the arse it was to "Hackintosh" back then, and with this board in-particular (but I already knew that it was doable), at least with "Snow Leopard", one issue being that needing to boot into 32bit macOS while setting up it doesn't like that it sees twice the amount of RAM than a 32bit memory controller can address and thus crashes during boot. Then there's a bunch of other things to remember, like legacy BIOS vs UEFI (emulated) booting and MBR vs GPT partition formats boot issues, certain model-IDs like "Mac Pro 5,1" (for smbios.plist) were only supported in 10.6.4+ or 10.6.5+ via model specific installers... those sorts of things. It's much easier to "Hackintosh" many more modern motherboards thanks to much more advanced boot-loaders, Clover and now OpenCore (which can be useful for real Mac Pros as well)!
After a few days of plugging away at it, I've got "Garage hacPro" running SnowLeo 10.6.8, GPU acceleration, sound, full sleep mode, all components working properly. SnowLeo was the primary OS that I wanted installed because it was the most versatile, it can run Intel 32bit, 64bit, and PowerPC (via "Rosetta" v1) code, and it's the last macOS version where they were not trying to remodel the OS based on their other OS/iDevices. This old box enables me to easily compile Xcode projects that were setup with now ancient Xcode versions (2.x,3.2.x,4.2.x, etc.). LC Community v6 and v7.x. fall into that category. Going in the opposite direction, this old rig could theoretically support up to Mohave, Big Sur, possibly even 10.12 Monterey IF, and only if, I drop in a CPU with SSE 4.x and "Metal" API compatible GPU (although that would break Graphics Acceleration in Snow 10.6!). I don't want to spend any more than $50 or so on updating this old hardware, but you CAN get a top-of-the 2009-line Core 2 Quad (or a modded 771 XEON w/SSE4) super cheap these days! Lower end (4MB Cache) Core 2 Quads can be had for as low as $5-10 on eBay now! It's snappy enough that it could still be used to do a LOT of things! And there's a few 32bit and PowerPC only games and things that I never found a comparable X86_64 replacements for (a certain 32bit audio plugin comes to mind).
I will also be installing other compatible OS on the many unused HDDs I have lying about. I intend to set up a 64bit AND 32bit Linux Boot drive, running actual officially "supported" (now very old) versions of Linux on "bare-metal" to test/develop on. This will be my go to machine for "piece of junk testing" and it will probably have multiple FreeBSDs / Linux(es?) installed at any given time. I know I could Live-boot from flash drives or use virtualization, but why not test against real, bare metal hardware since I have a lot of that collecting dust.
I'm also messing about with packaging tools lately, with the goal to release an OXT distro ASAP. I don't want to state a specific date because I've already missed two, self-imposed deadlines. Just know that I'm never gonna give it up (at least not anytime soon).
About once or twice a decade or so, I try to do some serious cleaning up in my "man-cave" areas. The garage is the major concern as that is where my Bass Guitar is! It's also where, for a good 10 years or so, I had built-up something of a computer support / repair / rebuilding / scrapping operation, mostly no-cost tech support, mostly for friends and family. I've accumulated many spare computer components during that time span (in addition to a few computer antiques, such as a Commodore VIC-20, that I'm keeping as collector items). My wife thinks I've become a "Hoarder", but I am trying to fix that now. For the most part, I've been done with most of that activity more than five years ago, and now that "Hackintosh" is nearing End-Of-Life, I see even less point to keeping all of this, mostly 10-15yr old junk around. Which is where this gets relevant to OXT...
Hoarder or not, I do like having at least one working computer setup in my Garage... for a quick recording session or a quick bit of retro-arcade gaming. So I decided to do one last final LGA 775/Socket T HacPro build using up the best of the parts I have laying around and recycling the rest. This meant testing and researching the parts, mount the drive to determine if there's any old data on HDDs that I want to back up first, and things like that. This all makes cleaning out my garage take MUCH longer than it should, but it also makes it a much more enjoyable process!
So I picked out the best, generic PC tower case of the bunch (sending 5+ other PCs for metals recycling), and then dropped in the motherboard from a Dell Studio 540, which I believe is a "Pennryn" era chipset (Intel ICH10 SATA controller) from about 2008/09 (the very end of the "Core 2" era), mostly because it had 4 RAM slots (but no 40-pin IDE support
). Added NVIdia GT240 1GB graphics card, 4x2GB (8GB) DDR2 DIMMS and set about rebuilding. I had forgotten what a pain in the arse it was to "Hackintosh" back then, and with this board in-particular (but I already knew that it was doable), at least with "Snow Leopard", one issue being that needing to boot into 32bit macOS while setting up it doesn't like that it sees twice the amount of RAM than a 32bit memory controller can address and thus crashes during boot. Then there's a bunch of other things to remember, like legacy BIOS vs UEFI (emulated) booting and MBR vs GPT partition formats boot issues, certain model-IDs like "Mac Pro 5,1" (for smbios.plist) were only supported in 10.6.4+ or 10.6.5+ via model specific installers... those sorts of things. It's much easier to "Hackintosh" many more modern motherboards thanks to much more advanced boot-loaders, Clover and now OpenCore (which can be useful for real Mac Pros as well)!After a few days of plugging away at it, I've got "Garage hacPro" running SnowLeo 10.6.8, GPU acceleration, sound, full sleep mode, all components working properly. SnowLeo was the primary OS that I wanted installed because it was the most versatile, it can run Intel 32bit, 64bit, and PowerPC (via "Rosetta" v1) code, and it's the last macOS version where they were not trying to remodel the OS based on their other OS/iDevices. This old box enables me to easily compile Xcode projects that were setup with now ancient Xcode versions (2.x,3.2.x,4.2.x, etc.). LC Community v6 and v7.x. fall into that category. Going in the opposite direction, this old rig could theoretically support up to Mohave, Big Sur, possibly even 10.12 Monterey IF, and only if, I drop in a CPU with SSE 4.x and "Metal" API compatible GPU (although that would break Graphics Acceleration in Snow 10.6!). I don't want to spend any more than $50 or so on updating this old hardware, but you CAN get a top-of-the 2009-line Core 2 Quad (or a modded 771 XEON w/SSE4) super cheap these days! Lower end (4MB Cache) Core 2 Quads can be had for as low as $5-10 on eBay now! It's snappy enough that it could still be used to do a LOT of things! And there's a few 32bit and PowerPC only games and things that I never found a comparable X86_64 replacements for (a certain 32bit audio plugin comes to mind).
I will also be installing other compatible OS on the many unused HDDs I have lying about. I intend to set up a 64bit AND 32bit Linux Boot drive, running actual officially "supported" (now very old) versions of Linux on "bare-metal" to test/develop on. This will be my go to machine for "piece of junk testing" and it will probably have multiple FreeBSDs / Linux(es?) installed at any given time. I know I could Live-boot from flash drives or use virtualization, but why not test against real, bare metal hardware since I have a lot of that collecting dust.
I'm also messing about with packaging tools lately, with the goal to release an OXT distro ASAP. I don't want to state a specific date because I've already missed two, self-imposed deadlines. Just know that I'm never gonna give it up (at least not anytime soon).
